


The Good Morrow

by Hark_bananas, huei



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Carole Lombard is an NPC, Diners, Dreams, Dreamsharing, Food, Getting to know you, Happy Ending, IKEA, M/M, Memory Loss, NASBB 2020, Not Another Stucky Big Bang, Pining, Sam and Steve's Great American Roadtrip, The Princess Bride References, Tony Stark Cameo, dream architecture, magical shenanigans that are never explained, seriously don't wait for an explanation, the subconscious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:56:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 75,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hark_bananas/pseuds/Hark_bananas, https://archiveofourown.org/users/huei/pseuds/huei
Summary: Every night, Steve falls asleep and finds himself dreaming about a diner, and every night he finds Bucky waiting for him there. But in the waking world, Bucky has disappeared, gone on the run after the fall of the Triskelion and Project Insight, and the strange dream that they share may be the only way that Steve has to bring him home.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Sam Wilson
Comments: 214
Kudos: 259
Collections: Not Another Stucky Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Kit: Let me just say that I'm so happy Nogi chose me as their collaboration partner because they've been a dream to work with and their art is wonderful! There are so many details in the art to pick out, and we hope you find them all 👀👀👀. This is our collab for the (Not) Another Stucky Big Bang 2020 and we hope you enjoy!
> 
> Posting schedule: two chapters a day until October 24th because life is short and accelerated posting schedules are IN, baby
> 
> (Also a huge thanks to my beta, she knows who she is)
> 
> * * *
> 
> Hello, Nogi (artist) here!  
> Just wanted to say i had lots of fun drawing for this fic, Kit is an absolutely delighful collab partner, and if the eagled-eyed of our dear readers has noticed something.. Well well i won't say much as to not spoil the fun ho ho!

* * *

He runs, he leaps, crashing through the window with his shield held in front of him, and once his feet are back on solid ground, he throws it with all his might. It sings as it flies through the air, a terrible, deadly song, but then comes the _clang_ and the heart-stopping moment where the man with the metal arm turns around and looks at him over the shallow dome, the split-second pause where he narrows his eyes as if to say _don’t try me_ , and the _whirr-zing_ of his improbable metal arm as he throws the shield back at Steve. It’s returned to him with such force that he slides back six feet on the rooftop gravel and his palms sting with it, the blow ringing painfully up through the marrow of his forearms to his elbows. He shakes it off and sprints to the edge of the rooftop and looks down.

The man is gone.

* * *

Steve puts his hand on the smudged glass of the door and pushes it open, a little cluster of bells on a loop of green cord jingling merrily above his head. A waitress wearing a no-nonsense white apron and a starched white cap is standing behind the wooden cash register at the bar across from the door _. She looks exactly like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey_ , he thinks, as she gives him a smile and a wave and then gestures to an empty booth to the left of the door.

As he walks over to the booth, he looks around. The diner is full of people, but they move with a turbid slowness, a head nodding here, a hand lifting a cup there, and their faces are vague, a muffled look about them as if he’s seeing them through a fog. The air is filled with an indistinct murmur, the soft clink of cutlery on porcelain, and conversation heard as if from behind a closed door, from another room.

He slides into the booth along the bench, which is covered in cracked red vinyl over worn-out spongy foam. The table is cream-colored formica with a tin rim around the edge, and there’s a little basket at the end next to the big plate-glass window with a bottle of ketchup and packets of sugar and two little cut-glass towers of salt and dusty pepper. Carole Lombard comes over and hands him a menu and gives him another smile.

He goes to open the front page of the menu, the stiff, laminated plastic tacky under his fingers, but when he looks down, he realizes with a jolt that he’s different. Or not different, that’s not right. It’s that he’s not different _anymore_.

He’s the way he used to be, before the serum, before Erskine, before the war, before the ice. His wrists look like two bundles of bone under his delicate, pale skin, his hands sticking out of the cuffs of his shirt suddenly too big again for his thin arms. He looks down in his lap; his thighs have lost half their thickness, and he can tell, even through the material of his dark twill trousers, how knobby his knees are, like two fistfuls of stones sitting at the ends of his femurs. With one hand he touches his chest, now flat as a pancake, and his neck, like a bird’s, and his jaw, almost completely smooth; the ever-present stubble he has nowadays is gone.

Carole Lombard comes back and he orders a BLT and a coke without really thinking about it or having actually looked at the menu at all. Every diner has them, though, and he supposes that this one is no exception. She nods, and when she picks up the menu and turns back to the bar with it, he realizes that there’s a sketchbook sitting on the table underneath. It’s the cheap kind you can buy at any stationary shop, bound in black cardstock and saddle stitched down the spine. The paper inside is of middling quality, thin and unlined, and there’s a black-and-yellow pencil stuck in the middle. It’s sharp.

He opens the notebook while he waits for his food and doodles a little on the first page. A bee and a sprig of lavender. The cauliflower he’d cut up for last night’s frittata. A dog, one he’d seen on the street a few days ago, some kind of tall, leggy mutt with a feathery tail and mile-wide grin.

Carole Lombard comes back and sets the BLT and the coke down in front of him. The coke is cold, the glass icy when he picks it up, and there’s a lemon wedge perched on the rim—just the way Nat had shown him how to drink it—though he hadn’t asked for lemon. The first bite of the BLT is so good, the brown bread toasted but still soft in the middle, the lettuce crunchy, the bacon warm and crispy, and the tomato tasting like a real tomato, not something that’s been in cold storage for the last two weeks. It’s a sandwich that tastes like summer, like walking out of the air conditioning and into the bright white blaze of the noonday sun, like a quick lunch eaten late over the sink after a long morning at the beach.

He takes another bite and feels, to his surprise, tears well up in his eyes. With the fingers of the hand not holding his sandwich together, he pinches the bridge of his nose and berates himself: _Jesus, Rogers, get it together_. But each emotion seems bigger, for some reason, here in this nondescript diner, the shock of seeing his real body like ice water dumped down the back of his neck, the insistent tug of nostalgia inherent in the taste of a really good BLT enough to induce tears. Pinching the bridge of his nose doesn’t work, and he eats the rest of the BLT with tears running down his face and drip-dropping into the mess of crumbs left on his plate.

When he’s finished, he feels like he’s experienced some sort of catharsis, the delicate cask of his chest empty and full at the same time. He swallows the last bite and wipes the sleeve of his shirt across his face, drying the tears as best he can. After a moment, Carole Lombard comes over with a smile and lays the check facedown on the table.

He wakes up.

* * *

“I had the weirdest dream,” he says to Nat. They’re sitting on the guest bed in Sam’s small house, the one they’re going to have to share because it’s the only one there is. Sam had insisted that the couch was great, he’d slept on it plenty of times himself when he’d dozed off in front of the TV, but neither Steve nor Nat mind sharing the bed. They’ve shared a bed before, on other missions. Or a tent, a too-small bunk, a cold prison cell, the floor of the quinjet.

“Was it the one where you tripped and fell into the cactus display at the garden center?” Nat’s toweling her hair dry, gently squeezing the water out of it bit by bit with the towel. Steve wonders idly why she doesn’t just scrub the towel all over her head and be done with it, like he does.

“No, I was in this diner, and I ordered a BLT and it was so good it made me cry.”

She snorts. “Always thinking with your stomach, Rogers.” He watches her scrunching the towel with her small hands, flexing her deceptively delicate man-killing fingers.

“You know, when the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe…” He pinches the imaginary slice of tomato between his fingers and Natasha flicks him with a corner of the damp towel.

“As if you could ever be Miracle Max,” she says. “You’re a born Fezzik.”

“Oh, come on. Bruce is Fezzik, obviously. Which means I’ve got to be Westley.” He grins, leaning back against the headboard and lacing his fingers over his stomach. He can always count on Nat for a little witty banter, which helps him to ignore the ache in his knees and the tingle of bruises being reabsorbed into his tissues. It’s nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

Nat’s smirk is mocking, derisive, familiar to younger brothers—informally adopted or otherwise—the world over. “Right, and what does that make me, Princess fucking Buttercup?”

He sits up and wrenches the towel out of her hands to swat her right back with it. “Pfft. As if I swung your way.”

“You did kiss me on that escalator this very morning…” She looks up toward the ceiling and taps her chin, as if puzzling out the implications.

Steve scoffs. “That was spy shit. You know you don’t have the right kind of equipment. No, you’re Miracle Max and… and Sam is Valerie.”

Nat opens her mouth to complain, probably about to say that she’s _obviously_ Inigo Montoya, but Steve’s stomach rumbles all of a sudden. “Damn, and I was ready to go to bed, too.”

Natasha gives him a sour look as she turns down the sheets on her side. “You’re healing, you need extra calories. Don’t try to hide it, I know you better than that.” She slips under the covers and spreads herself out like a starfish, taking up all of Steve’s side with her man-killing fingers and toes. “You’d better hop downstairs and see if Sam can give you a snack,” she says, with a glare that brooks no argument. “I’m not sharing a bed with your empty stomach.”

* * *

He puts his hand on the smudged glass of the door and pushes it open, a little cluster of bells on a loop of green cord jingling merrily above his head. A waitress wearing a no-nonsense white apron is standing behind the cash register at the bar across from the door. _She looks exactly like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey_ , he thinks. She gives him a wave and a smile and then gestures to an empty booth to the left of the door.

As he walks over to the booth, he looks around; the diner is full of people, but it’s hard to see their faces. He can make out the suggestion of an ear here, a nose there, but taken as a whole, they’re blurry, like portraits done in pointillism, like looking at Seurat with his glasses off. _I don’t wear glasses anymore,_ he thinks, and then he remembers. _Oh, it’s this dream again._ He looks down at his hands, the same hands that he’s always had, but attached, now, to his old, familiar wrists.

He slides into the booth, same side, facing the door, right as Carole Lombard comes over and hands him a menu and gives him another smile. He doesn’t even turn it over, just says, before she can walk away, “A BLT and a coke, please.” She smiles and whisks herself away with the menu untouched.

When he looks back down at the table, the sketchbook is there again, same black cover, same pencil stuck in the center. When he opens it to the first page, his doodles from the previous dream are still there: a bee, a cauliflower, a dog. He pulls the pencil out and taps the end on his lower lip a few times before he draws his compass, the one with Peggy’s picture in it. She stares out at him from the cup of the flipped-up lid, that knowing smirk on her face.

He thinks about going to find her at the field office late one night, when he knew she’d still be poring over paperwork and he’d be able to catch her alone. “This is a war, Steven,” she said. “Don’t start on me with that bullshit about propaganda. You are central to a narrative which it is necessary to preserve for the purposes of morale, so just flash that compass for the cameras a few times and then go suck Barnes off behind the latrines, I don’t care.” Everything Peggy did had fire in it; the careless movement of her hand flipping her hair off her shoulder left an afterimage like an arc of bright flame. “But you cannot come barging in here, interrupting me in the middle of my work, and expect me to soothe your feelings. Do it again and I will get you put on KP, see if I don’t.”

The picture in the compass, the real one in the Smithsonian, is faded and yellowed with age, a cutting from a newspaper that was never meant to stand the test of time. In the doodle, he sharpens the silhouette of her hair, her flashing eyes, the sly half-grin, a joke for the two of them to share. “Just think of it as one of the many sacrifices we’ve required you to make for the cause,” she said to him later, when he’d come back, unable to let it go. “Is Barnes as upset about it as you are?”

“No,” he said, “he agrees with you. Thinks that spinning this story that I’m hopelessly in love with you is great for gossip, gives the guys all something to talk about, and the people back home. But it’s a lie, and you know how I feel about lying, Peg.”

She rolled her eyes fondly, but he knew that she was reaching the limit of her patience. “You have to realize that when you signed up for Project Rebirth, it wasn’t just a new body you were getting. It was a new image, a new life story. But we both know that it’s not real. It’s not really your life, just like it’s not the body you were born with. Barnes knows that, too, and is there anyone else’s opinion you really care about?”

“God, Peg.” What a woman. What a friend. “You know me so well,” he said ruefully, and then he’d let the matter drop.

Carole Lombard comes back with the sandwich, but he doesn’t pick it up, not yet. He can smell the toasted bread and the smoky bacon and the sharp, acidic tang of the tomato, but first he sets his pencil to the page again and dashes off a quick portrait, almost in one continuous line. It’s the picture that should have been in the compass: Bucky in his uniform, pressed and neat, the flat-topped service cap perched on his head with that careful carelessness he was so good at. He’s looking into the distance, a half-grin on his face.

The picture had been taken in the months when he and Bucky were apart, when Bucky was already in Europe and Steve was treading the boards on the bonds circuit, getting increasingly desperate. Peggy had shown it to him once when they were going over the files of all the Commandos, and his fingers had itched to slip it out from under the paperclip and into his pocket, where he could have kept it safe as Bucky’s proxy, where he could have taken it out and looked at it and smoothed his thumb over Bucky’s sepia cheek whenever they were apart.

Finally, he sets the pencil down and picks the sandwich up. It tastes just like it did yesterday, so crisp and juicy and salty and smoky, the culmination of everything a good sandwich should be, that he tears up again, and this time, he doesn’t try to stop it. He just lets himself cry until the sandwich is finished.

After a moment, Carole Lombard comes over with a smile and lays the check facedown on the table.

He wakes up.

* * *

“I had the dream again,” he says to Nat, half turned around in the front seat of Sam’s car so that she can hear him properly.

“What dream?” Sitwell asks. They’re speeding down the freeway on their way to the Triskelion. It’s not really the time to talk about the dream, but the silent tension in the car is pulling the threads that bind them all together tighter and tighter, driving Steve to distraction. He has to break it somehow.

Steve can’t see where Nat has her hands, but they must be on Sitwell somewhere, because she frowns minutely and immediately afterwards, he hisses through his teeth in pain. “The one with the diner?” she asks pleasantly.

“Yeah, that one. And I ordered another BLT, and it was just as good as last time.”

“Nice,” Nat says wistfully. “My dreams all tend to be… about what you’d expect.”

“There’s a place right off the Mall that makes these BLTs—” Sitwell starts, because he’s the kind of person who never learns his lesson, but Sam interrupts him. “Man, shut the fuck up. No restaurant near the Mall is gonna know anything about how to make a good sandwich. Now, there’s a place in my neighborhood that smokes their own meat, it’s actually a barbecue joint but they do BLTs, too, with nice thick slices of bacon, more like rashers than the American-style stuff we’re used to. They’re so good.”

“A nice MLT, mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean—” Steve starts to say in his Miracle Max voice, but then Sitwell goes out the window and he suddenly has other things to think about.

* * *

“You’re not Buttercup,” he says later, while she’s getting stitched up. They’ve given her an anesthetic, but he can see the muscle jumping in her jaw when she clenches her teeth. He gives her his hand, and she squeezes it so hard he grimaces.

“So who am I, then?” She sounds flippant, lightly curious, but he knows her well enough that he can hear the camouflaged pain in her voice.

“Inigo Montoya, of course.”

“You killed my father. Prepare to die,” she says, grinning weakly. She squeezes his hand while he looks at the rough wall, dynamited out of the rock. A few more minutes pass in silence, nothing but the murmur of the doctors floating over the scream of tires on pavement and the screech of a knife cutting through metal and the zip of a silenced gun that runs through his head on a loop. Then Natasha says, “You know, I don’t think you’re actually Westley.” Her voice is stronger, steadier. The painkillers must be taking effect.

“Hmm?” It takes him a moment to realize what she’s said. His head is miles away, still fighting for his life beside a smoking underpass.

“Nope, now that I think about it,” Natasha continues, “ _you’re_ Buttercup.”

He looks at her clearly, now, and is startled to see that she’s not smiling. “What do you mean?”

“It’s obvious, the blonde hair, the perfect breasts,“—she lets go of his hand, which starts to tingle immediately as the blood rushes back into it, and smacks him in the chest—“the masked man…”

“Nat, don’t,” he says, and to her credit, she doesn’t. Instead, her hand finds his again, grasps it tight.

“Sorry.”

He nods, staring blankly at the cave wall again. What he wouldn’t give to be back in that diner right now, doodling in his sketchbook and waiting for his BLT, a little respite from the real world. Some time to think, some time to grieve. “We’ll find him,” Nat murmurs, while the medic smooths the last bandage down on her shoulder, and squeezes his hand tight.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of bells jingles above his head. There’s a waitress standing behind the cash register at the bar across from the door. _She looks exactly like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey_ , he thinks.

 _Ah, right._ He’s been here before.

He’s on his way to his booth before Carole Lombard can wave him toward it. _Maybe something different today,_ he thinks, and when she brings him the menu, he waves it away and says, “A grilled cheese and a coke, please.” She nods and walks back toward the counter.

When he looks down, the sketchbook has magically appeared again. He makes a mental note, _next time I’ll have to watch and see if I can catch it appearing_ , assuming already that there will be a next time. Whatever trick his subconscious is trying to play on him, whatever it may be trying to tell him, a little whisper in the back of his mind says that this won’t be the last time he dreams about the diner.

He flips the sketchbook open to the first page and pulls the pencil out; his sketches from the first two days are still there: the bee, the cauliflower, the dog. The compass, Bucky. He flips to the next page and sets the point of his pencil on the paper, not sure what to draw, if he should draw who he really wants to, or if he should try to put him out of his head and think about something entirely different. _Some time to think, some time to grieve._ He’s waiting for some sort of divine inspiration when the door to the diner opens, the bells jingling merrily as they swing back and forth on their green cord. He glances up.

There stands Bucky in the doorway, his brow knit, looking mildly confused. He’s Bucky as Steve remembers him from the late 30s, early 40s, tall and lean, rangy rather than muscular. He’s wearing baggy trousers and, Steve sees with a painful clench of his heart, the green wool shirt he’d had on when Steve had pulled him off the table in Kreischberg. It’s ragged, torn around the collar, the sleeves pushed halfway up his forearms. The same button is missing from the placket, the button that broke Steve’s heart when he’d noticed it the first time. He couldn’t explain it then, and he can’t now, but looking at the space where it should be makes him ache in a marrow-deep way, like pressing hard on a fresh bruise.

But his face… the clothes contrast strikingly with Bucky’s face, sweet and open and unlined, no tears in his eyes, no blood in his ear, no thousand-yard stare. His hair is cut short around the sides and the back, but it’s longer than when he was in the army, long enough on top to start curling where it’s swept back over his ears. He looks exactly the way Steve remembers him at twenty, twenty-one, at his liveliest, full of grace.

Steve watches as Carole Lombard gives him a wave and a wink and gestures toward the booth where Steve is sitting. Steve watches as he turns around and notices him, watches the way some small, undefinable emotion passes over his face and disappears, just as quickly as it had come. Then he smiles, bright and easy, and walks up to the booth.

“Hi, mind if I sit here?” he asks, chipper but vacuous.

Steve doesn’t hesitate. “No, not at all. Go ahead.” He’s absurdly proud of the way his hand doesn’t shake as he gestures to the other side of the booth. Bucky slides in, settling himself on the plush red vinyl and looking around. “Fancy place,” he says under his breath, and then whistles in admiration. Steve’s heart feels like a dove trying to beat its way out of his chest, and he curses his subconscious, _How could you. How could you do this to me. Of anything you could have shown me, it had to be Bucky like this, like when I first fell in love with him._

“Uh, yeah,” he says out loud, “they make a great BLT.” At that moment, Carole Lombard comes to the table with his grilled cheese and coke. Bucky looks up at her, his grin brilliant, insouciant, and waggles his eyebrows. “Nothing for me, doll,” he says, and she gives him a wink and then walks away.

Steve shuts the pencil in the sketchbook and pushes it away, then picks up one of the triangles of grilled cheese. It’s gooey and rich, toasted golden with butter on the outside, the signature orange color of processed American cheese on the inside. When he takes a bite, it’s meltingly warm and salty and soft in his mouth, the taste of home, of kicking his feet against the rungs of the old wooden chair that sits at his place at the kitchen table.

He can feel the tears welling up in his eyes again. But even though this is his dream, he feels like he can’t cry in front of dream Bucky, this ethereal figment of his own imagination, so he sniffs a little and takes another bite and keeps the tears on the inside.

Dream Bucky seems to notice anyway, though. “That good, huh?” he asks, one side of his mouth cocked up in a grin.

“I told you you should try the BLT,” Steve says, and then takes a sip of his coke. It’s sweet and tart and the bubbles combined with the greasy, buttery grilled cheese is perfect, just perfect.

He wants to stare at Bucky, to drink him in, to overlay him on top of his memories from the 1930s like tracing over a drawing on a piece of paper, again and again. His blue eyes are as clear as cat’s-eye marbles, the dimple in his chin stands out in relief in the wan morning sunlight floating in through the window beside them, and there’s a curl, just the one, lying dark and glossy on his forehead.

Steve licks his lips and glances down at his sandwich, and when he looks back up again, Bucky is looking at him curiously, but it’s a curiosity with a sharp edge.

“Say, do I know you?” he asks, and Steve has to swallow hard around the sudden fist of panic and anguish that punches up into his throat.

“Yeah, we’re, uh, we’re friends.”

“Hmm,” Bucky says off-handedly. “You do look like someone I’d be friends with.” He smiles at Steve again, sweet and friendly, but it’s empty, like there’s nobody home behind it. There’s nothing ghost-like about him—Steve can see the flutter of his pulse at his throat—but there’s no light in his eyes, just a depthless, cat’s-eye blue.

Steve looks down at his plate and takes another bite of his sandwich, trying to think of what to say next, but when he looks back up at Bucky, something in his face has changed; he looks sick, dark circles under his eyes that Steve hadn’t noticed before. He begins to shiver.

“Bucky, are you alright?” he asks, dropping the sandwich on the plate and reaching out with both hands. Bucky’s face turns distressed, anguished, even, and as his body is wracked with shivers of greater and greater magnitude, he says, tears standing out in his eyes, “Who the hell is Bucky?”

And then he disappears.

Steve sits frozen at the table, alone. All around him, he’s aware, once again, of the murmur of indistinct conversation, the clink of a spoon stirring cream into a cup of coffee. He looks down at what’s left of his grilled cheese sandwich and pushes it away, appetite suddenly gone.

A moment later, Carole Lombard appears at his side and lays the check facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

* * *

It’s dark in the corner of the underground bunker where they’ve stretched out their bedrolls, only a little light coming from further down the long hall where some of Fury’s people are still busy murmuring over their computer screens. He’s wedged between Nat and the cold rock wall, Sam on the other side and a little further apart. They’ve been through more in the last few days than most civilians go through in a lifetime, and the hardest part is yet to come. But still, they hardly know each other; it makes sense that Sam’s not comfortable sleeping all piled together like he and Nat do, like puppies, like children.

Nat’s sleeping peacefully on her back, the arm on her injured side held close to her chest, the other, next to Steve, flung up above her head. Her hair is standing out like a rusty halo around her soft face on the pack she’s using as a pillow. He can see the way her eyes flick back and forth in a dream under her pale eyelids.

He scoots a little nearer to her side, trying to get closer to her radiant warmth without moving in a way that’ll wake her up, but her eyes fly open immediately and he can hear her heartbeat pick up and then slow back down in the few seconds it takes her to figure out where she is. She turns her head on the pillow and frowns at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“Don’t lie to me, you were trying to snuggle. Something’s wrong.”

He rolls over onto his back and looks up at the rough rock ceiling, almost invisible in the darkness. “I had the dream again.”

“The BLT dream.” She doesn’t ask; she remembers.

“Yeah, but this time I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Good choice.” She scoots close to him so that they’re pressed together arm to arm, now, and hooks her ankle over his calf. “So what’s the matter?”

He swallows heavily. “This time, Bucky showed up. And he sat down at the table with me, but he didn’t know who I was. And after just a minute or two he started to look really sick, he was shivering and his lips were blue and he looked like he was about to pass out, and I said, ‘What’s the matter, Bucky?’ and he said, ‘Who the hell is Bucky?’ And then he disappeared.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then she says, “Damn, your subconscious is a bitch.”

He laughs wetly. “Yeah.”

“Roll over.” He rolls over, facing the rock wall, and she plasters herself up against his back, the teaspoon to his big soup ladle. He wishes, not for the first time, not for the hundredth time, that he was small again, back in his pre-serum body, that someone, _anyone_ could spoon him the way Bucky used to. Not often, but sometimes, like now, he yearns for the days when Bucky could cover him up with his whole body, wrap him up with his arms and legs like a birthday present. When, in the privacy of their little apartment, he could allow himself for one whole hour to feel enveloped, protected, cherished, small. But that line of thought draws a fresh wave of tears. He tries to swallow them down, and is only partially successful.

It helps, though, a hot body warming his back, a hand resting loosely on the curve of his waist. “We’ll find him,” she says into the back of his neck. “It’s on my to-do list.”

He smiles at nothing, huffs the barest sliver of a quiet laugh through his nose. “Oh, well that takes a load off my mind.”

“Damn straight,” she murmurs sleepily. “Number one, take down Project Insight. Number two, find Bucky.” He squeezes her hand where it’s resting on his waist, unable to speak around the lump in his throat, and she squeezes him back. “And number three, try out that sandwich place in Sam’s neighborhood.”

His stomach rumbles quietly, the bastard. “Sounds like it’s time for breakfast,” he says.

“No, shh, go back to sleep, five more minutes,” she murmurs. “We’ve got a big day ahead of us. You need to be well-rested if you’re going to take down the government.”

* * *

“You know me,” he says later, on the helicarrier. He doesn’t need to raise his voice; in spite of the deafening scream of metal being wrenched apart and the thunder of the whole word imploding, Bucky hears him anyway.

For a split second all he can see is Bucky’s face from his dream, sweet and open and unlined, young and free. _Say, do I know you?_

“Bucky, you’ve known me your whole life.”

_Yeah, we’re friends._

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

And then he’s falling.


	2. Chapter 2

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of bells jingles above his head. There’s a waitress standing behind the cash register at the bar across from the door. _She looks exactly like Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey_ , he thinks.

 _Ah, right. This dream again_.

He moves toward his booth and nods at Carole Lombard when she glances up at him. She comes over with a menu, but he waves it away and says, “A patty melt and an ice water, please.” She smiles and goes back to the counter.

There’s the black sketchbook, appearing out of thin air as if magicked into being. _Well, this_ is _a dream,_ he thinks. There’s no magic about it. It’s just what his brain decides it wants, and if it wants a sketchbook, it gets a sketchbook. He’s the conductor of this orchestra, though he’s not exactly sure which instruments he’s working with.

As if he’s reading his own mind, the door to the diner opens, the bells jingling merrily as they swing back and forth on their green cord. He glances up and finds that the thing he really wants is standing in the doorway, his brow knit, looking mildly confused.

He’s the same as last time, same ragged wool shirt, same haircut, same look of confusion on his face. As Steve watches, curious and stricken in equal measures, a series of undefinable emotions pass over his face, his confusion morphing into something adjacent to fear, or a deeper, more profound consternation. Before Carole Lombard has a chance to give him a wave and a wink, he turns his head and looks directly at Steve, and seems to relax and stiffen at the same time, as if something in him is reassured, and something else is made nervous.

Carole Lombard gestures toward the booth, and he smiles, bright and easy, and walks over. “Mind if I sit here?” he asks, chipper but careful.

Steve doesn’t hesitate. “No, not at all. Go ahead.” He gestures to the other side of the booth. Bucky slides in, settling himself on the plush red vinyl and looking around. “Fancy place,” he says under his breath, and then whistles in admiration.

It’s not like the last time, though. Before, he’d been cheerful but empty; he’d been missing his third dimension, like a photograph come to life.

But there’s something behind his eyes, now, and Steve can’t figure out what it is. He doesn’t know if he’s imagining the hesitancy, the recognition, but then he realizes he’s second-guessing that he’s imagining something that his mind is conjuring up for itself while he sleeps and immediately feels the spike of an incipient headache. It’s too much, too weird, these layers of recursive dreaming that could end up pitting himself against himself, if he lets them. So he just shakes his head minutely, the universal gesture for clearing one’s thoughts, and looks up at Bucky, trying to match his grin.

Bucky’s still smiling at him, eyes slightly narrowed. But when he opens his mouth, all he says is, “You an artist?”

Steve looks down at the sketchbook, surprised to see it still there. “Oh, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I do sketches and stuff. But it’s been years and years since I actually painted or did anything else serious like that.”

“Can I see?”

Steve thinks about the dashed-off picture of Bucky on the first page and feels inexplicably embarrassed, like it’s too private to share with this figment of his own imagination. “How about I draw you a portrait right now, while I’m waiting for my food?” he counters.

“Sure.” Bucky looks pleased. “How do you want me?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, whatever pose you can hold for five minutes.” Steve has to swallow hard, though, and glances quickly down, hiding his swimming eyes under the fringe of his hair. _How do you want me_ , in those few glorious years they lived together before the war, was so often answered with a joking “on your knees” or “on the bed” that it became a prelude to sex, their shorthand for _I want you, I need you, I love you, please take me._

Bucky doesn’t seem to notice, or at least Steve doesn’t see him notice because he doesn’t look back up until he’s got the sketchbook situated on the table, turned to the next blank page, and he’s sure that his tears are gone.

Bucky has arranged himself in the corner, slouched down with his elbow on the table and the opposite foot on the bench, his knee cocked against the back of the booth. He’s still smiling, but it’s complex, a nuanced smile that Steve doesn’t know what to do with. He’d wished, the day before last, for five minutes respite in the diner in the dream, but now he feels like asking his brain to change the channel. It’s not that he doesn’t want to see Bucky. It’s because he is, in fact, desperate to see Bucky. Any Bucky—baby-faced 1930s Bucky, haunted post-Kreischberg Bucky, Bucky beating him to death on the helicarrier, panting above him, fist poised to strike, face twisted into a knot of anguish. He’s not dead, though, this is a dream, right? What if he wakes up and Bucky is there? What if he wakes up and Bucky is there and he remembers him, and—

But the last thing he remembers is looking up into Bucky’s face as the helicarrier fell to pieces around them. Then Bucky’s face, getting further away, and then the memory stops. What if he actually _is_ dead, and this is his afterlife? Some small whisper of a thing that looks suspiciously like relief brushes across his consciousness, but then he thinks, _What if Bucky’s dead, too?_

All of a sudden, his chest feels so tight, bound in the iron grip of animal terror and fresh grief, that he can’t breathe for a second. He’s looking at Bucky, who is looking at him, the smile still plastered on his face, but something akin to concern mixed in with it.

“Sorry,” Steve finally managed to say. “Sorry, my asthma’s acting up.” He coughs falsely, ostentatiously and gropes around on the table for his pencil.

Bucky’s mouth turns down in a moue of commiseration, amiable and sympathetic, but before he can say anything, Carole Lombard interrupts with his patty melt and his ice water. “Thanks,” Steve says, and then, recovering some of his composure, to Bucky, “Let me just get you blocked out and then I’ll eat. Do you want something?”

“Nah, I’m fine,” Bucky says, and then sits stock still, staring at Steve with that enigmatic smile while Steve hastily blocks out his pose. After a few minutes, he shuts the sketchbook with the pencil marking his page and sets it down on the table, picking up the patty melt. It’s exactly what he was expecting, somehow so delicious and satisfying, salty and meaty and cheesy. It’s the culmination of all the patty melts he’s ever had in his life, the very essence of a quick lunch on a busy, productive afternoon in the city. He feels the expected tingle in his sinuses again, but it’s easy to blink the tears away before they even form; it seems like he’s getting better at controlling his dream emotions.

“Mmm,” he hums around his mouthful, “this is delicious.” But when he looks back up, something in Bucky’s face has changed again. It’s just like the last time, though the shivers are gone. But there are dark circles under his eyes, and he looks like he’s exhausted. A cut has appeared on the bridge of his nose, scabbed over; it looks like it’s several days old. He’s sitting hunched over a little, holding his right arm crossed over his chest, like he’s favoring it, like he’s in pain, _like it’s dislocated_ , thinks Steve with a jerk.

He almost says, _Bucky_ … but stops himself in time. “Are you alright?” he asks instead. Bucky squeezes his eyes shut and grimaces, and Steve can hear the creak of his teeth as he grinds them hard together. His breath is coming in small, painful gasps, and as Steve watches, his eyes fly open wide. “I…” he says, and disappears.

Steve lets out the breath he didn’t know he was holding, and then the tears that he hadbeen holding come out all at once in a flood, raining down on his plate and the other half of his patty melt.

Carole Lombard appears at his side and lays the check facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

The first thing he sees is the dim light of a curtained window reflected off the switched-off fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. There’s music playing somewhere close by. He looks through the veil of his eyelashes without really opening his eyes and realizes immediately that he’s in a hospital room somewhere. Everything hurts, his lip is stinging, his right eye, when he opens it a little wider, seems to be couched in one gigantic bruise. _Oh_ , he thinks. _I’m not dead._

There’s someone sitting to his right, and for a split second, his heart soars, _Bucky?_ and then plummets again when he realizes how improbable that is. But then when he turns his head to look, it’s Sam, reading a book, and it’s so good to see him that his heart does another little bump, like when the rollercoaster hits its second hill.

His eyes are downcast, but he looks good, no injuries that Steve can see. He looks like he’s got all the time in the world, nothing to do but wait for Steve to wake up and talk to him.

It’s hard to take a breath, something in his chest burns when he tries, but he gets enough air to say, “On your left,” and is wonderfully rewarded by watching Sam out of the corner of his eye as he looks over and smiles.

“How you feeling?” Sam asks softly.

“Like I was hit by a truck,” Steve says, closing his eyes again. Keeping them open is too much work, and there’s a pressure around the back of his right eye like it’s being squeezed by a menacing fist.

“That’s an understatement,” Sam says, and he sounds a little fond and a little exasperated. How’d Sam get to be fond of him inside of a week? Bringing down a corrupt government agency brings people together, Steve supposes.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, because it _is_ an understatement, and because it’s second-nature to him to downplay things. Bucky used to say… but then he gets sad again, the rollercoaster plunging off the tracks and plummeting straight into the ground. A small breath, a small sigh, “How long have I been out?”

“Two days, give or take a few hours.”

His eyes fly open at that, and he tries to sit up, but his abdomen screams at him to take it easy, for fucks sake. “Oh shit, I didn’t know it had been that long.”

He turns his head to look back over at Sam, who’s frowning severely. “Look, Steve, you were shot four times, fractured your skull and your right orbit, you have more cracked ribs than whole ones right now, not to mention the dislocated fingers and two lungsful of nasty Potomac river water. You’re only not dead because of the healing factor, and because your boy fished you out of the river in time.”

“What?” It comes out as a whisper; he can’t summon either the breath or the energy for anything else, but the desperation and hope are surging in his chest and there’s a buzz in his ears like a whole swarm of bees.

“Yeah, somebody on the other bank was filming everything that was happening and they caught him pulling you out of the water. It’s so far away you could be two anybodies, but Nat confiscated the footage and checked it out. Said it was definitely him.”

“So, where…”

“No idea,” Sam says. “You’ll have to talk to Nat about that when she has a minute, but I don’t think she knows, either. Not yet. He seems to have disappeared into thin air.”

Steve closes his eyes again, drained like an old battery, just half a minute from drifting back into sleep again, whether he wants to or not.

“Sam,” he murmurs, and Sam has to lean over the bed to hear him. “I like the music.”

Sam’s grin is bright enough to shine through his half-closed lashes. “I knew you would.”

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. There’s a… _Ah. Right._ Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar. He gives her a wave; she waves back.

He orders a BLT again just for the comfort of it and then opens the sketchbook. On the second page is the half-blocked out picture of Bucky, one knee cocked against the back of the booth. While he waits for Bucky to show up, he starts filling in the details from memory, the wrinkles in the material of his trousers that fan out from where his knee is bent, and the soft dent the knee makes in the spongy vinyl backrest of the booth. The tabletop, scuffed and dull with age, and the incidental still life of ketchup, sugar packets, salt and pepper shakers. He starts to work on Bucky’s left arm, the one he had draped carelessly along the edge of the table, his long, fine bones and his elegant, square wrist, when Carole Lombard interrupts him by setting the BLT and coke down on the table in front of him. When he looks up, she gives him a wink and a smile and turns away.

The other side of the booth is still empty.

He feels something he can only identify as the onrush of panic—panic that he won’t dream about Bucky? That Bucky missing from the dream means something, that it’s a correlation for Bucky missing in real life? That if his subconscious’s Bucky construct disappears, that it means he’ll slip through Steve’s fingers in the waking world like so much sand? He doesn’t believe in dreams as augurs, though; they’re his brain working through the events of the day in the way it knows best, they’re an expression of his innermost desires. But right now, the thing he desires above everything else is to see Bucky. He doesn’t even need to touch him, to taste him, to take him in his arms and never let him go. He just needs to set eyes on him, just once.

But the door to the diner stays closed, the cluster of bells unrung.

He picks up the BLT—might as well—and takes a bite, not stopping to savor it, unable to taste anything but the saltwater of his tears as they run into the corners of his mouth. Bucky’s not coming. He finishes the first half of the sandwich and then puts his hands in his lap, careless of his greasy, crumby fingers and shuts his eyes tight and tries to will Bucky into existence, to breathe life into his construct, to make the door to the diner open and the bells jingle and, by the power of dream-logic, to pull him through from whatever crevice in Steve’s mind he’s hiding in.

But the door stays closed, the bells unrung.

All he can see behind his eyelids now is Bucky’s face, _who the hell is Bucky_ , the implacable metal fist poised to strike, _you’re my mission_ , the pain and the rage and the confusion and the loss written across his beloved face like a slash of charcoal on white paper, unmissable, indelible. His face like a child’s, the hurt broken open, the wound worn on the surface, pure id with no ego to hide behind.

He doesn’t open his eyes until Carole Lombard comes over and lays the check facedown with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

Nat hands him the folder in the graveyard. It’s just a thin thing, with a paper cover that was low-quality when it was bought new, however many decades ago. And now it’s faded, the dull brown color of institutional ennui, the corners foxed. Falling apart.

She gives him a kiss and turns away, but not before he sees the tears standing out in her eyes. He bites his own lip to keep from calling out to her. He knows he’ll see her again, she just needs some time to disappear and to build back up the reserves she’s drained in the last chaotic fortnight. But in the last few years, she’s been the unmovable rock against which his unstoppable force has found a little respite. It’s hard not to feel like this is just the next in the long line of things he’s lost in his life, like holding his ma’s hand in the hospital as she breathed her last, like stretching the same hand out for Bucky, years later, as the bar on the side of the train gave way and he fell… and fell and fell.

 _You know me_ , another hand.

And another: _‘Cause I’m with you ‘til the end of the line_

He opens the folder as Nat walks away and there, paperclipped to the inside front cover, is the picture, _that_ picture, Bucky in his flat cap and his enigmatic smile, the picture he’d longed to swipe from that file back in 1944.

It’s like taking a fist to the gut—he feels an intense burst of pain and nausea sweep over him at the same time, and there’s a scream welling up inside him like a bubble of scalding water inside a geyser. He draws in a breath, but then there’s a hand on his shoulder, the touch light and solid at the same time. Sam is standing behind him; Steve can only see him out of the corner of his eye, but his face is resolute.

The steam dissipates, Sam’s hand on his shoulder like a valve letting the pressure out. Steve feels soothed in a way he can’t quantify, like splashing his face with water after coming back from a run or a cold cloth on his feverish forehead. He closes his eyes and shuts the folder again on the picture of Bucky, and the other picture of Bucky, the one where he’s blue and cold, his sweet face rimed with ice.

He sniffles and wipes his nose with the back of his hand as Sam grips his shoulder tighter for a just a second and lets go. Then Sam asks, a soft question with hard resolve behind it, “When do we start?” 

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open, the little cluster of doorbells jingling above his head. He waves to Carole Lombard, standing behind the bar; she waves back, gives him a smile, and points to his booth.

Someone is already sitting there. He pushes his glasses up his nose—has he been wearing glasses this whole time? He’s never actually noticed—and the dark crown of loose curls that peeks over the top of the booth turns. Whoever it is has noticed the door opening.

He’s over at the table in two strides, despite his shorter legs. Bucky looks up at him and smiles.

Steve stares at him for a second, taking him in, his sweet face warm and bright like a tea rose in the sun. This is the third time he’s seen Bucky in his dream, and each time he changes a little, gets a little more real. Not entirely three-dimensional; Steve still feels like if he moved swiftly enough, he’d be able to catch a glimpse of the other side of Bucky, unfinished like the back of a piece of stage scenery. Dream Bucky, by his very nature, only exists because Steve perceives him.

But he’s not as vacuous as he was the first time. His smile has something behind it, and if Steve doesn’t exactly know what that is, that doesn’t make it any less complex.

He grins back. “Hi, mind if I sit here?” Bucky nods— _of course—_ and he slides into the booth as Carole Lombard comes up and lays his menu down with a wink and a smile. “Have you been here long?” Steve asks.

Bucky looks around, a little frown gathering itself into a wrinkle between his brows. “I don’t think so? Hard to tell, though.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, flipping the menu over without even looking at it. He can’t tear his eyes away from Bucky. His face is glowing in a way unaccounted for by the bright morning sun streaming in through the big plate-glass window, a dream-like radiance that seems to emanate from within. But at the same time, he can’t stop imagining the baby face in front of him overlaid with the face in the photo from the cryochamber, eyes closed, sunken cheeks speckled with frost, at peace in the way that only the dead can be. He swallows hard around the inevitable lump in his throat. “Have you already ordered?”

“I…” Bucky hesitates, his eyes darting around the diner swiftly in a way that looks automatic, “I didn’t get a menu. Carole Lombard over there waved me to this table, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to order anything. So I didn’t.”

Steve scoffs. “This is my dream, you have my permission to do whatever you want. Order a whole Sunday roast if you feel like it.”

The frown reappears between Bucky’s brows and his gaze turns inward, confused or contemplative, Steve can’t tell. But then as soon as it comes, the mood passes like a cloud flying across the face of the sun and he says, “Sunday roast, huh? Maybe I will.”

“Alright, me too.” A moment later Carole Lombard is back at the table. “Two Sunday roast dinners, with peas and mashed potatoes and gravy. And uh,”—he looks at Bucky—“what do you want to drink?”

“Water’s fine, I guess.”

“Okay, and two ice waters, thanks.”

Carole Lombard nods and takes his menu, walking off. The sketchbook appears, unsurprisingly, on the table underneath, but he pushes it to the side, for now.

“See? Told you. My dream, my rules.”

“Your dream, huh?” Bucky says, and Steve recognizes the look on his face. Mildly teasing, indulgent, it used to irritate Steve to no end when he was trying to be serious and Bucky made a show of humoring him. But now he cherishes it, the way Bucky purses his lips, one side quirked up, the laughter in his eyes. _Jesus_ , Steve thinks _, I’m really projecting_. But then, _Fuck it, my dream, my rules._

“So if this is your dream,” Bucky asks, as if reading his mind, “what else could you conjure up?”

Steve drums his fingers against his lower lip. “I don’t know, I never actually tried to conjure anything.”

“How about an apple? That should be easy.”

Steve shrugs. “Sure.” He laces his fingers on the tabletop and closes his eyes tight. He thinks about an apple, a green one. A green one with a little red blush on the side, a Fuji, nice and crisp and not too sweet. His mouth starts to water and his stomach audibly complains, and he hears Bucky laugh at him, low and amused, from the other side of the table.

When he opens his eyes, there’s no apple in sight, but Bucky’s openly grinning at him now and the look on his face makes Steve’s heart soar. “Guess not,” he says sheepishly.

“Maybe anything you want, you have to order it through Carole Lombard.” As if conjured by her name, she sidles up at that moment with two white china plates and sets them on the table. Thick slices of roast beef and a cloud of mashed potatoes drowning in brown gravy, a pile of bright green buttered peas on the side. Two glasses of ice water and two rolls of silverware appear out of nowhere, but Steve is too busy looking at the food to notice where they’d come from.

“Holy shit,” he hears Bucky whisper.

“Yeah, I know,” he says in return, and unrolls his knife and fork. There’s a sound like the softest whimper from the other side of the table and he looks up, startled, to see Bucky staring at his food like he doesn’t know what to do with it. Something in his face has changed, but Steve’s not surprised; it follows the same pattern as the last two times. It’s not that he’s got a different face, it’s the same youthful, rounded chin and pink cheeks and smooth forehead, but somehow, in spite of that, he looks haggard, starving, exhausted. It’s like an afterimage, this unwell Bucky superimposed on the lovely dream Bucky that Steve’s brain has conjured up.

“Are you alright?” he asks, reaching out with his hand, but then pulling it back into his lap when Bucky recoils.

“I… I.” He takes a few gulping breaths, seems to center himself, somehow, and gives Steve a weak smile. “Yes.”

 _What kind of weird subconscious mindfuck is this?_ Steve thinks. He casts about for a clue, something that might give him an idea of what’s going on. But as far as dreams go, this recurring series has been relatively mundane. No pink elephants, no yellow submarines, no red tin box with a sign saying _Break Glass in Case of Weirdness_. Just a classic diner, a familiar-looking waitress, and Bucky. So he decides to take it at face value.

“Alright. Let me know if I can help you with anything.” Bucky smiles the same weak smile again, a winter solstice sort of smile, pallid and short-lived. The interior glow of his face has dimmed to something easy to miss, like the flicker of a candle in a faraway window, and even the sun seems to have ducked behind a cloud in sympathy.

Steve cuts a slice off the perfectly pink roast beef and loads it up on his own fork with mashed potatoes. The potatoes are perfect, of course, he’d expect nothing less from this dream diner. The perfect combination of buttery and salty, maybe a hint of roasted garlic and black pepper, and together with the juicy snippet of roast beef… he closes his eyes and a little moan escapes, unbidden. He can almost hear the cacophony of Sunday dinners with a big family around him, the piping voices of a passel of little girls; he can almost feel Bucky kicking his ankle under the table so that they can snicker together at some private joke.

“Jesus,” he says as he chews, his words a little garbled, “this is spectacular.”

When he opens his eyes again, Bucky has picked up his own fork in his right hand, but he’s holding it in his fist like a rose, or a flag. He’s staring at Steve, his plush pink lips parted, and the shock Steve feels at the look on his face is like a slap, sharp and painful. He looks more than hungry, he looks ravenous, but at the same time there are visible tears standing out in his eyes, and as Steve painfully swallows his half-chewed mouthful, Bucky sniffs loudly. One single tear falls out of the corner of his eye and runs down the crease of his nose.

He doesn’t make any move to brush it away, doesn’t even look like he notices. Steve feels heartsick, curses himself for turning this dream into a nightmare, but stretches his hand out to the center of the table, palm up, fingers slightly curled and relaxed. “What’s wrong?” he asks softly. The noise of the diner, which always exists right under the surface of his awareness, seems to have faded out entirely, now. All he can hear is his own heart beating rapidly in his ears and the sound of Bucky’s ragged breathing.

Bucky sniffs again. “I don’t… I… I can’t.” He gestures at the plate with his empty left hand and Steve says, “Can’t eat?”

Bucky’s mouth shuts with a snap and Steve can see the bulge of muscle working in his jaw as he clenches his teeth. Then he says, a harsh rasp, “I don’t know how!” and throws the fork down on the table, where it clangs violently against the edge of the plate and rebounds into the packets of sugar, knocking over the plastic holder.

Then he’s gone.

The fork is sitting in the mess of sugar packets like a loose boulder at the bottom of a landslide. Steve can still taste the butter and salt of the mashed potatoes in his mouth as he drops his head into his hands and rubs viciously at his eyes with the heels of his palms, feeling the sting of impending tears.

There are soft footsteps beside the table, and he looks up. Carole Lombard lays the check facedown with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

“Hey, you want to go to that place with the BLTs for dinner?”

Steve looks up from the papers he’s been staring at for the last two hours, his spine protesting as he straightens up out of his habitual hunch. The serum keeps him from ruining his back with his terrible posture, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

“Huh?” He rubs his eyes with his knuckles.

“Steve,” Sam says, “you’ve been working on that for hours, now. I still don’t know why you won’t just let Stark or somebody do it for you digitally. It’d take three minutes.”

Steve glances down at the table, Sam’s kitchen table, where he’s been translating Bucky’s file manually, a Russian-English dictionary in one hand, a cheap composition notebook in the other, and halfway visible in the murky depths of his mind, the Introduction to Russian course he’d taken when he’d first come out of the ice and was looking around for things to occupy his vast expanses of free time.

“Opsec, you know that. Nat would kill me if I digitized something that only exists on paper.” He stretches his arms out, glories in the satisfying snap and pop of his joints, and then puts his pencil down in the crack in the notebook to mark his place. “But you’re right, I should take a break.”

“You shouldn’t be the one doing that in the first place,” Sam says, gently exasperated. “It’s taking too much out of you.”

Steve thinks about the horrors he’s been copying out carefully in his copperplate hand— _convulsive seizure induced at 35 mA; given the subject’s resistance to behavioral correction; administration of vitamin-deficient nutrient paste resulted in; a clean fracture heals in max. 26 hours while a compound—_ and he knows that Sam’s right.

But that doesn’t mean that Steve has to admit it out loud. Nat would see right through him, but Sam… he’s only known Sam for a couple weeks. They’re not there yet. “Nah, I’m fine,” he says, tucking the soft quid of pain deep down into the bottom of his heart, where it won’t show. “What were you saying about dinner?”

“I asked if you wanted to go to that place with the BLTs. You remember, when we were in the car, right before your boy ripped my steering wheel—“

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve interrupts, rolling his eyes. Sam has every right to be upset and angry about everything that happened with Project Insight and the events surrounding its downfall, about Bucky’s role in it all and Steve’s dogged loyalty to him in spite of it. But he just treats it like a joke, calls Bucky “your boy” and makes little counterfeit put-upon noises when the car or the shoot-out or his wings or the helicarriers are mentioned. Steve doesn’t know if Sam’s trying to play it down to preserve Steve’s own feelings, or if he really is, actually, over it, but regardless, he’s grateful.

But then he thinks about what Sam’s actually said, _that place with the BLTs_ , and feels a little sick to his stomach. “Could we… not have BLTs?”

“Oh sure,” Sam says. “They do barbecue, too, or we could have pizza, or whatever. I know a sandwich isn’t really dinner food, especially not for you.”

“It’s not that,” Steve says. He hesitates. He doesn’t know what he should tell Sam, how much of the burning trash barrel that is Steve Rogers he should actually let Sam see. He _is_ a counselor, maybe he could help. But on the other hand, Steve’s not going to take advantage of him like that. Sam’s signed up to help him find Bucky, not mine the deep veins of woe that run Steve through and through.

“It’s not that,” he starts again. “It’s the dream.”

Thankfully, recognition dawns immediately over Sam’s face. “Oh, right, yeah, I remember you mentioned something about that in the car. So what’s the matter, then?”

Steve looks at him, watches Sam watching him with his patient, wide-open eyes. The sun is going down behind the trees across the street from Sam’s house, and twilight is descending fast on the kitchen, casting them both in shadow. But Sam’s face is luminous, shining with an invisible light that Steve can sense, but not see, on a wavelength too long or too short for even Steve’s inhuman eyes. 

In the merciful half-darkness, he blinks back the unexpected wetness clinging to his eyelashes and clears his throat. “Why don’t we go get some pizza and I’ll tell you all about it.”


	3. Chapter 3

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. He waves to Carole Lombard, standing behind the bar; she waves back, throws him a wink, and points to his booth.

Someone is already sitting there. The dark crown of loose curls that peeks over the top of the booth turns; whoever it is has noticed the door opening.

Two strides and he’s standing beside the table. Bucky looks up at him, his smile friendly and open and a little bit hopeful, brows drawn up in the middle like he’s asking for… clemency? Or understanding. As if he remembered what happened last time.

Steve grins, bright and happy. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Of course not,” Bucky says, gesturing grandly to the other side of the booth. “You don’t have to ask. This is your dream, anyway.”

Steve’s head snaps up as he’s scooting down the vaguely tacky vinyl of the bench. “So, you remember?”

“Remember what?” Bucky’s still looking at him in that same open, friendly way, beautiful and engaging, his face the one that features prominently in all of the best memories that Steve returns to like a moth to a candle, over and over again. 

“Remember from one dream to the next, I mean.”

A look of confusion clouds Bucky’s bright face, his eyebrows beetling together in a frown. “I don’t know.”

_Take it at face value_ , Steve reminds himself. He holds his hands up, palms forward, a gesture of peace and comfort. “Okay, that’s fine, no problem.” Carole Lombard appears at the table at that moment and lays the menu down in front of Steve, then whisks herself away again.

“What should we have today?” Steve asks, opening the menu, but Bucky begins to shift in his seat, the air around him clouding with a surge of discomfort. He looks down at his hands, clasped on the table, his right thumb stroking softly over the big knuckle of his left, and then glances toward the sugar packets.

Steve shuts the menu again without even looking at it and holds out a hand, just like last time, in the center of the table, palm up, fingers slightly curled and relaxed. It’s not that he expects Bucky to grasp his hand, but there’s something about it that signals openness, an offering, but receptive, not imposing. “Wait. If you remember from one dream to the next, then you remember what happened last time.”

There’s a long pause while Bucky regards him, just looks at him steadily, his face closed off now like the hidden door to a secret passage. But whatever he sees on Steve’s own face must be enough, because there’s a crack in the façade, and then he nods, just once, up and down.

“You said last time you don’t know how to eat.” The phrase _administration of vitamin-deficient nutrient paste_ flashes across his mind, but he pushes it away and keeps his face carefully blank. Another nod, up and down. “Then why don’t we order something that’s really easy, something basic, and we can start there?”

Bucky regards him again for an uncomfortably long time, and Steve has the strange sensation of being perceived internally, X-rayed, his ghostly white bones on public display. Finally, Bucky asks, “Why?”

Steve shrugs. “Why not? This is my dream, I can do what I want. If you want to figure out how to eat, I’ll make it happen.”

Lo and behold, Bucky smiles, a small slip of a thing that appears in the corner of his mouth like a two-day-old moon. “Alright. You’re the boss.”

Steve grins. He has no idea what’s going on, but _take it at face value_ covers a multitude of sins. “You bet I am.”

Carole Lombard, possible mind-reader, appears at that moment.

“We’ll have two peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches and two cups of coffee with extra cream,” he says, and she nods and disappears with the menu. Steve automatically pushes the materialized sketchbook out of the way and clasps his hands together on the tabletop.

Bucky’s looking at him again, but it’s a different kind of regard, more openly curious than before. Steve regards him back, drinking in his soft and lovely face, the one irrepressible curl that lies on his forehead, his long, pale neck and the tender spot, lost in shadow, where his jaw meets the plump lobe of his ear…

Steve shakes himself, shivers, almost. _That’s dangerous territory_ , he thinks. He doesn’t really want this to turn into a sex dream, doesn’t even know if it _would_ turn into a sex dream. There’s something so nice and comfortable about all of this, the anticipation of a good meal, the palpable contentment he feels sitting across a table from Bucky. Even if he could crawl across to the other side of the booth and plant his tingling lips on Bucky’s hot neck like a vampire who feeds on sighs and moans, he wouldn’t. Probably.

God knows how much of his thought process is visible on his face. When he focuses back on Bucky, he’s still smiling, curious and amused in equal measures.

“So…” Steve says, trying to cover the embarrassment he feels and distract himself from the hot, bright point of light in his groin, “You asked me a few dreams ago if you knew me, and I said we were friends.”

This is a mistake, of sorts. The smile immediately drops off of Bucky’s face, replaced by a wary rigidity that doesn’t quite cover the anxiety behind it. Steve does the thing with his hands again. “We don’t have to talk about it. I was just wondering if you remembered that I’d said we were friends.”

Bucky opens his mouth, but at that moment Carole Lombard comes back with the two sandwiches and two cups of milky coffee. She sets everything down in its place and then leaves.

Steve watches Bucky watch his sandwich, looking at it warily as if it’s going to jump up and bite him on the nose. He’s not really sure what to do now, not even sure what Bucky had meant by _I don’t know how_.

_Take it at face value,_ he reminds himself for the third time, but then it jolts him, a little bit, to realize that he’s thinking about Bucky like he’s really Bucky, not some lovely amalgamation that Steve’s subconscious has cooked up for his delight and dismay. The jolt is followed by the swift sting of sadness, a stiletto of loss pricking his heart.

Bucky, meanwhile, has picked up one of the perfectly-cut triangles of bread and is looking at it, eyes narrowed. Steve pushes his feelings down into the iron-bound strongbox in the bottom of his chest and sits on the lid. Then he picks up his own triangle and holds it out like a glass of champagne. “Cheers!”

The first bite is perfect, of course it’s perfect, the bread soft and pillowy, the peanut butter creamy and nutty with just the right amount of grape jelly to give it the sweetest summer tang. He didn’t eat many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a kid, but it tastes like childhood, all the same, like the droning of cicadas, like slipping on your sneakers without untying the laces, like lying under a tree watching the clouds through the leafy green canopy, and the exquisite boredom of a Tuesday afternoon in July.

He looks up in time to see Bucky wipe his nose on the back of his wrist, followed by a sniff that he tries to hide in a cough. His sandwich only has one tiny nibble marring the perfect hypotenuse, but Steve knows he’s feeling exactly the same thing, maybe even stronger.

“That good, huh?” he says with half a grin, as much as he can manage, before he takes another bite. Bucky’s gaze is distant, looking over Steve’s shoulder, and he shakes himself subtly before he says, “Why am I thinking about the smell of fresh-cut grass? And summer? I don’t even…” he looks down at his sandwich, confused. “I didn’t even know that was something I knew.”

Steve shrugs. “Dream logic.”

Bucky takes another bite, this one a little bigger, and chews slowly, deliberately, rolling the bite around in his mouth while Steve watches his face. After he swallows, he looks back down at the sandwich and murmurs, “It’s… chewy, so different—” but cuts himself off, glancing quickly up at Steve and away.

“Different from what?” Steve asks offhandedly, though he thinks he knows the answer. Bucky just shakes his head and brings the sandwich up to his mouth for another bite.

They finish the sandwiches in silence, Steve lost in his own thoughts and Bucky looking unfocused, as if he were watching something being projected on the inside of his own chest, invisible to the rest of the world. Finally, he finishes the last bite and dusts the crumbs off his hands with a sigh of contentment. Then he tips his head onto one palm, looking at Steve, who is finishing the dregs of his coffee, and says, “I recognize you. From the museum.”

Shocked, Steve bites down hard on the ceramic rim of the coffee cup, feeling the cold-hot bone-hollow jolt of it stab through the nerves in his teeth. “What, the Smithsonian?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. His eyes are darting around Steve’s face, resting for just an instant on his ear, his mouth, his forehead. “You’re different.”

Steve looks down at himself, skinny wrists, sunken chest, thin thighs. “That’s an understatement. I look totally different.”

Bucky meets his eyes, shakes his head minutely. “But I can see it in your face, though. You’re the same person. You’re Steve Rogers.”

Carole Lombard, that unfailing Charon, appears beside the table and lays the check facedown, right as Bucky says, “I know you.”

He wakes up.

* * *

They’re on the parkway, just crossed over the border into Maryland when Sam asks, “Did you have that dream again?”

They’re driving to New York in a rental car that Steve insisted on paying for, a big gas-guzzling SUV that looks nothing like Sam’s defunct sedan, and which makes Steve feel, irrationally, a little safer. Tony had offered to send a jet down to pick them up, but they’d both agreed, after a three-word conversation, that they weren’t ready to get on anything that was going to take them up in the air again. _Worse for Sam_ , Steve had thought; his own superpowers didn’t depend on a pair of wings.

Since Steve had paid, Sam had insisted on taking the first turn, so Steve’s been staring out the window at the passing traffic for the last half hour, thinking about nothing, thinking about everything.

“Yeah,” he says, after the moment it takes him to catch up, “and it’s so weird. It’s the most vivid, complex dream I’ve ever had. Everything is so nuanced, I can see the micro-expressions on Bucky’s face in real time.” There’s a pause, but Sam just lets him think. “Last night I ordered both of us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and he looked at his like it was a rock with a bug underneath. But he liked it, I think. Said it made him think of summer.” He closes his eyes for a moment, feeling again the timeless gravity of interminable summer afternoons long past. “Me too. You think my subconscious is trying to tell me something?”

“No,” Sam says flatly, and Steve laughs. “Really, I mean it. Dreams are just your way of working through whatever happened to you recently. If this dream was about Bucky reacting to food, maybe it has something to do with the fact that you ate a whole extra-large anchovy pizza last night right before bedtime.”

“Oh, come on,” Steve complains, “it was delicious!”

“Hey, I’m not accusing you of anything. Have a little self-awareness, Steven.”

Steve laughs again and slouches down in his seat, putting his knee up on the dashboard.

“Really, though, what does it mean?” Sam opens his mouth, but Steve goes on before he can interrupt. “I’m just talking out loud here, I’m not trying to get counseling services for free.”

Sam shrugs. “Alright, then. I’ll interrupt you if you say something extra stupid.”

“Thanks, Sam, you’re a real pal.” Steve reaches out and pats his shoulder.

“My pleasure.”

“So, I mean,” Steve continues, “maybe it means that I think of Bucky as a child, a tabula rasa. You read my translation of the file, you know that after each time they sent him out, they… they wiped him.” Sam makes a sad little soothing noise in the back of his throat. “Like, he actually was a tabula rasa. And also…” It’s not exactly like there’s a lump of tears in his throat; he doesn’t feel like he’s going to cry, but the words are a handful of pebbles in his chest, meaningless, unable to do anything but click dully together when he shifts in his seat. “He said he recognized me from the Smithsonian. And then he said, “You’re Steve Rogers. I know you.”

“And what did you say?” Sam asks, breaking his silence.

“That’s when I woke up.”

They drive on in silence for a moment before Sam says gently, “Well. What would you have said?” Steve makes a noise of helpless defeat, and Sam goes on, “You know, what we’re doing right now, the whole goal of this is to find him. One of these days you’re going to see him face to face and he’s going to say, ‘I know you,’ and you’re going to have to say something back.”

Steve looks out the window again. The trees look dusty, their new spring leaves already weary from exposure to the constant parkway traffic. “I know,” he says. “It’ll be hard not to just…” Sam waits patiently for him to finish his sentence. “Not to just take him in my arms.” The pebbles clack together; what a lousy sentence, what little it expresses of the magnitude of love and devotion that he’d had for Bucky. That he has.

“I’ve got to ask a question,” Sam says, and Steve recognizes that tone of voice.

“Oh jesus. Okay. Shoot.”

“You guys were together, right? Before.”

Steve pulls his knee down and sits up straight in his surprise. “Yeah? Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know that you didn’t know. It’s not a big secret.”

Sam takes his eyes off the road for a second to swivel his head and look at Steve, his eyebrows pulled down over his nose. “Yes, it is! I mean, I had my suspicions, but it wasn’t like they put it on a plaque at the Smithsonian or wrote it into the history textbooks or anything.”

Steve huffs a breath out between his lips. “Okay, yeah. I guess it wasn’t a secret to people who know me well. But you and I don’t know each other all that well, yet.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sam says, and Steve can see the grin nestled in the corner of his mouth. “We’re running buddies and we’ve been fugitives from justice together and we took down a rogue government agency and now we’re going to find your long-lost boyfriend who tried to murder us. I’d say we’re getting pretty tight.”

Steve laughs, but he can’t stop thinking, _your boyfriend, your boyfriend._ That’s not right… or is it? _My dead boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend_ , neither of those are exactly right, either. _The love of my life? My reason for living?_

“Lemme ask you something,” he says, trying to head that line of thinking off at the pass. “When was the last time you ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

“Pff.” Sam narrows his eyes, thinking. “No idea. Probably not since I was a kid.”

“Imagine you ate one right now, what would it remind you of?”

“Oh, that’s easy, fighting with my sister because she always wanted my mom to cut her crusts off and I always said that only babies ate sandwiches with no crusts.”

Steve grins and looks out the window, watching the scrubwoods of Maryland pass by, thinking again about the hot, yellow, overinflated-balloonness of summer vacation in 1925, about jumping into the fountains in the park and being chased out again by red-faced policemen, and about the sharp-soft smell of Bucky’s sweaty eight-year-old head as he shared Steve’s one thin pillow, sleeping over again for the third time that week.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. He waves to Carole Lombard, standing behind the bar; she waves back, gives him a smile, and points to his booth. Bucky is already there.

“Hi, Steve,” he says with a grin as Steve slides into the booth.

“Hi,” Steve says as he situates himself. He doesn’t want to use Bucky’s name because he still remembers that first dream like it was last night, the way Bucky’s face changed, the way the tears sprang into his eyes, the _who the hell is Bucky_?

So instead, he asks, “What should we order today?”

“Another sandwich?” Bucky looks hopeful. The morning sun is pouring its light through the big window beside them, picking out the coppery sheen of his dark, loose curls, and Steve feels almost sick with how much he longs to reach out across the table and run his fingers through them, sweep them back from Bucky’s temple and behind the perfect curve of his ear.

Instead, he clears his throat and looks down, pretending to examine the menu, though his eyes skate right over it. “How about grilled cheese?” he says. “I had that the… I’ve already had that here, and it’s really good. And with tomato soup, the perfect combo. Sound good?” When he glances back up again, Bucky’s still looking at him with that curious, wide-open gaze, cool and blue-grey, but Steve senses an unsounded depth like the sea at the edge of the continental shelf.

“Sure, Steve, that sounds great.” He sounds like he’s trying the name out, like he knows it’s the right one, but it’s new, something to play with, a button to push to see how Steve reacts.

Carole Lombard comes and takes their order and disappears with the menu.

Bucky doesn’t look at Carole Lombard when she comes to the table; in fact, he hasn’t looked away from Steve at all. Steve feels strangely reluctant to meet his eyes, so he feigns interest in his sketchbook. “Would you… do you remember the other day when I started drawing you?”

“Hmm.” Bucky narrows his eyes and hums like he’s actually trying to remember. When Steve glances up, he’s looking down at his hands where they’re clasped together on the tabletop, his right thumb stroking jerkily over his left. “Yeah? Yeah,” he says belatedly.

“Do you mind if we keep going, then? I can probably finish it in another session or two.”

Bucky’s eyes dart up to meet his and then down to the sketchbook, which Steve has opened to the drawing, and then over to the pencil tucked into his fist.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine,” he says. And then just sits there, thumb rubbing against thumb, looking at Steve nervously, a little lost.

It takes Steve a minute to put two and two together but then he spins the sketchbook around on the table and slides it toward Bucky. “What do you think so far?” There’s not much to see, just the pose blocked out with no more detail than the wrinkled trousers and the scuffed formica tabletop that he’d filled in the day that Bucky hadn’t shown up. But Bucky looks at the page with an intensity that belies his offhand manner. After a moment, he carefully slouches back against the corner where the booth meets the window and pulls his leg up, resting his knee against the back of the booth and his arm along the edge of the table.

“Like this?” He flashes Steve a smile so blinding that it whites out his vision for a moment, as if the sun shining in from outside the window had suddenly halved its distance to the Earth.

Steve blinks to clear the motes of light out of his vision. “Yeah, perfect. You’re perfect,” he says, and then puts everything he has into concentrating on the paper, feeling the burn of a blush stain his cheeks.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, Bucky posing with his familiar careful carelessness and Steve intensely focused on his drawing, trying not to feel the hot, golden weight of Bucky’s gaze on the crown of his bent head. Normally, he’d be making mistakes all over the place, too distracted to get his hand to follow well the line of what he sees, but for some reason everything goes perfectly, every stroke well placed, every hatch the perfect shadow. All of a sudden, he realizes that while the dream provides him with a pencil and a sketchbook, there’s no eraser.

He opens his mouth to say something about it, but Bucky gets there first. “Is it gonna have a title?”

Steve glances up, right into the full weight of Bucky’s gaze. The corner of his mouth is turned up in a smile, but his eyes are questioning, even calculating. Steve is caught a little off-guard, so he makes it a joke. “Sure, I’ll call it _Random Diner Patron_.”

Bucky laughs, but then he bites his lip, the smile disappearing, his face turning somber. He opens his mouth to say something, but at that moment Carole Lombard appears beside their table with two plates of grilled cheese and two bowls of steaming, fragrant tomato soup.

It’s the same as before, and the same as last time. The same as every time, in fact. The cheese is perfectly melted, the outside of the bread toasted crisp and golden in a generous amount of butter. The soup, when he dips a corner of the sandwich into it, is both sweet and tart and tastes, again, like home, like a few hours with his ma snatched from the time between when he got home from school and when she had to leave to go work night shift at the hospital. It tastes like the touch of her cool fingers sweeping his hair off his forehead, the way she said, “Goodbye, darling, be good while I’m gone” as she slipped her shoes on. For a moment, it overwhelms him, how much he misses her, how he longs to sit at the old, scarred kitchen table again while she heats up a can of soup for his lunch.

He knows there are visible tears in his eyes, but he glances up anyway. Bucky’s own eyes are closed tight, but there’s a thoughtful, almost longing set to his face, his jaw working as he chews slowly. His tongue darts out to lick the sheen of butter from his lips, and Steve watches, mesmerized, his own sandwich forgotten until Bucky’s eyes pop open and he grins.

“This is very good.”

“Yeah, I know. What… what does it remind you of?”

Bucky looks thoughtful again, his eyes going unfocused, compressing his lips into a thin line. “A kitchen with flowered curtains on the windows. There are a couple little girls sitting at a table. I can hear their voices but I don’t know what they’re talking about.” He looks a little unnerved. “That’s really strange.”

Steve feels bereft. Bucky’s talking about his own kitchen, about his baby sisters. It used to be his job to make lunch for them when his ma was at work at the hat shop; of course he would have whipped up something like grilled cheese and a can of tomato soup. It strikes him for the hundredth time how nuanced this dream is, how ultrareal, how vivid, yet subtle.

He makes a noise of vague interest, subsumed again in his own thoughts about the dream, about his ma, and takes another bite of his sandwich. They sit eating in silence for a while until Bucky clears his throat purposefully. When Steve looks up, he has finished his sandwich and is holding his spoon. He meets Steve’s eye, and again, it’s a look that almost bowls him over, the same questioning, calculating look as before. “Will you put my name on it?”

“On what?”

Bucky jerks his chin toward the closed sketchbook and looks back up at Steve again. “On the picture.”

Steve looks at Bucky looking at him. This feels like a test, and he considers his answer carefully for a moment before he says, “Sure. What name do you want me to use?” He wipes his fingers off on the napkin next to his plate and opens the sketchbook, picking up his pencil.

Bucky’s biting at his lips again and it looks compulsive, in the same way that his eyes flick around the diner in a nervous moment. “In the museum…” he starts, but trails off.

Steve waits patiently, pencil poised over the page.

“In the museum, it said my name was James Buchanan Barnes.”

Steve nods, holding his breath, feeling like he’s standing blindfolded on the edge of a precipice, not sure if the ground is six inches or six hundred feet away.

“But that’s not what you called me.”

“No.”

“You called me something else.” Steve doesn’t know whether he’s talking about in the past, in the dream, on the helicarriers. He could be talking about anything, but there’s only one thing he means, the only thing that counts in the moment.

“Yeah. Bucky.” The word leaves his lips, the soft plosive B, the hard staticky K. Bucky doesn’t disappear or look confused or angry. In contrast, he looks gratified, almost happy at the sound of his name from Steve’s lips. So Steve says it again. “Bucky.”

“Yeah, Bucky.”

Steve grins at him, unable to help himself. “Is that the name you want me to use?”

“Yes. Please.”

“Okay.” He scrawls it across the top of the page in his neatest handwriting.

_Bucky_.

He’s not really ready, neither of them have finished their soup yet, but Carole Lombard appears anyway, the last stop on the line that puts an end to their conversation. She lays the check facedown with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

They spend almost a week in Manhattan making a game plan and going over intel before Steve decides he’s going to jump out the nearest window without a parachute—again—if he hears Tony make one more snarky comment about _your boyfriend_.

For some reason it sounds different when Sam says it. Sam says it like it’s a given, like it’s a well-worn, time-honored moniker, like Bucky is just some guy his friend Steve is dating. But Tony says it like he’s trying to goad Steve into snapping and taking a public stance against homosexual debauchery in the twenty-first century. At first Steve is surprised, because Harold _definitely_ knew about him and Bucky, considering that Bucky had won a key to the laboratory from Harold in one night’s heated poker game and had left it very clear that he only wanted the space afterhours so that he could fuck Steve in soundproofed peace.

(“You’ll contaminate my samples!” Harold had said, not nearly as aghast as Steve had thought he should be.

Bucky had rolled his eyes. “You’re not a fucking biologist. Anyway, we’ll bring a blanket and do it on the floor.”

“And clean up afterwards,” Steve had chimed in.)

But then he thinks about the way that Tony talks about his dad, how little they had to do with each other, how strained the relationship, how overshadowed by the spectre of Captain America. Of course Howard would never have mentioned that Steve happily spread his legs for his right-hand man at every opportunity—and he didn’t even know the half of it. So here’s Tony, thinking Steve is some buttoned-up, all-American homophobe out of his depth in the deviant future. Steve could explain, could set the record straight, but there’s something about Tony that makes him not want to. There’s a coarse satisfaction in seeing Tony operate without all the information, in seeing him be wrong.

_Well_ , Steve thinks. _Won’t he be surprised._

So they leave, taking a laptop and a thumb drive, some changes of clothes, a convenience store-worth of snacks, a small arsenal, and one of Tony’s company cars, freely given, gratefully taken. Steve drives first this time, but it’s not until they’re crossing the border into Pennsylvania two hours later that Sam thinks to ask whether he actually has a driver’s license.

Steve just looks at him side-eyed and laughs.

“No, seriously,” Sam says, turning in his seat so he can glare at Steve’s profile. “Do you have a driver’s license? I don’t want to have to wait for your sorry ass to get out of jail in the middle of Indiana or whatever because the cops picked you up for driving without one.”

Steve laughs even harder. “Captain America doesn’t need a driver’s license,” he says, and then when Sam opens his mouth to start yelling, he goes on, “but Steve Rogers has one. It’s even current. You can look in my wallet if you want.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” Sam says, all suspicious. “I trust Captain America, but Steve Rogers is an asshole.”

“I swear on the soul of my father, Domingo Montoya, that I have a driver’s license,” Steve says seriously, slapping his free hand over his heart. Sam just tuts and shakes his head, so Steve slides his wallet out of his back pocket, tossing it over the center console and into Sam’s lap. Sam flips it open and flicks through the few cards that Steve carries around with him—debit card, library card, driver’s license, a couple hundred dollars in cash. Steve sees when Sam finds the picture of Bucky, the one from the file, flat cap and half-grin, in its little protective transparent sleeve. But Sam doesn’t mention it, just slides it carefully back into its slot. Then he snaps the whole thing shut and tosses it back into the center console.

“Alright, alright, you have a driver’s license. But do you have a license for those guns?” He reaches over and punches Steve lightly in the shoulder. “Just asking for when I have to call 911, ‘cause your biceps are about to commit a homicide on that poor t-shirt.”

“Oh my fucking god,” Steve says, while Sam cackles in the passenger seat.

* * *

“Hey, Bucky,” Steve says when he slides into the booth in the next dream, and Bucky’s grin grows wider and more brilliant, a lightbulb in a power surge.

“Hey, Steve,” he says. “Sandwiches again today?”

“Whatever you want, Bucky,” Steve says, just to see the little glint in his eye when Steve says his name, the way he preens, subtly, almost invisibly.

_God, this feels so real_ , Steve thinks for the umpteenth time, but he forces himself not to slump in melancholy defeat like he wants to. Instead, he pulls his shoulders back toward his spine and says, “You want to pick something today?”

“Oh,” Bucky says, the warm glow of his smile dimming a little. “No, you… you go ahead and order.”

Carole Lombard materializes beside the table with the menu, but Steve waves it away and says, “Two heros, please, and two ice waters.”

“Heroes, huh?” Bucky says, and the way that he says it, Steve knows that he doesn’t know what a hero is, and probably doesn’t know the names of any kind of sandwich apart from the ones they’ve already ordered.

“They’re good, you’ll like ‘em,” is all he says, though, before he opens the sketchbook to the drawing of Bucky from last time. He leaves it sitting flat on the table, but Bucky merely glances down at it before he turns sideways in his seat, pulling one leg up onto the bench and resting his arm on the table.

There isn’t much left for him to do, just some shading, a few of the finer details, and he’s almost finished by the time their heros come out from behind the bar.

They’re gorgeous sandwiches, though of course he would have expected no less—crisp lettuce and red onions and a mountain of salami and prosciutto and mortadella and provolone all inside a long roll with a soft exterior that gives satisfyingly under his fingers when he picks it up. Oil and vinegar drips out the bottom onto his plate, where a dill pickle spear sits next to a little mound of potato chips.

It’s a sandwich that tastes like New York, like standing in line at the deli and pretending not to listen to the neighborhood gossip, like meals eaten on the fly in the park or at the beach. It tastes like eating standing up with oil and vinegar dripping down his arm, gritty sand between his teeth, hunched over to protect the last bits of meat and cheese from the flocks of wheeling, screaming seagulls, like running laughing into the water, belly full and shoulders sunburnt, to wash off the drips he hadn’t been able to catch on his tongue.

He finishes half his hero and then, feeling full already, he pushes the other half away and pulls the sketchbook in front of him. His pencil barely touches the paper; there’s not that much left to do. Highlight the sheen on that particular curl, soften the shadow behind that ear, lengthen Bucky’s eyelashes by half a millimeter, and then it’s all done.

Steve signs his name at the bottom of the page, and then spins the sketchbook around on the table and slides it toward Bucky. There’s a pause while Bucky chews and swallows the food in his mouth, and then he says, “You know, that’s not what I look like.”

Steve feels a little flair of irritation; he’s no Velazquez, but he’s not half bad. “I mean, it’s not a photograph, but I think I did a pretty good job,” he says, grinning to cover up his pique.

“No, no, I mean…” Bucky sets the end of his sandwich down on the plate and wipes his hands on a napkin, then pulls the sketchbook closer toward him. “I mean, my hair is longer. And…” His face turns a little wary. “I have a metal arm.”

“Oh,” Steve says, a flash of pity and remorse there-and-gone in his chest. He looks down at himself, and then back up at Bucky. “Well, this isn’t what I look like, either.”

Bucky takes another bite of his sandwich, and while he’s chewing, his eyes roam all over Steve’s face, then down his neck to his chest, then to his arms, and his hands sitting still on the scuffed tabletop. Steve feels a prickle at the base of his skull, and a wave of goosebumps rushes over his scalp and down the back of his neck. Bucky’s discerning gaze feels like the subtle touch of a shrewd finger ghosting over the surface of his skin.

“Yeah, I remember,” is all Bucky says, though, when he finally swallows his bite.

“From the museum?” Steve still feels full, but he pulls his plate back over to pick at the potato chips.

“Yeah.” It doesn’t exactly sound like he’s telling the whole truth. But what’s truth inside the gilded cage of a dream, anyway? Looking for truth from a figment of his own imagination is just another way of looking at himself in a mirror, and what’s more, a mirror that’s tarnished, the surface clouded over with something that won’t wipe off.

Bucky finishes the last bite of his sandwich and wipes his fingers on the napkin again. The sketchbook is still sitting right next to his plate, but he doesn’t look at it. Instead, he keeps looking at Steve, eyes roaming methodically over his body until Steve feels like he’s being scanned for a new super suit, each millimeter of his physique accounted for. “You took a serum or something, the museum said.”

Steve coughs around the jagged piece of chip that gets stuck in his throat, and he has to pound on his chest for a moment before he can say, “Yeah, it was… it was the only way I could get into the army.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. “They wouldn’t…” he starts to ask, and then cuts himself off, his eyes going to Steve’s chest again, his narrow shoulders, his thin wrists, _flick flick flick_ like a crime scene photographer. “No, no, of course they wouldn’t.”

And what can Steve say to that? It still stings a little, something that was said and done seventy years ago—though if he takes the ice out of it, it was far less than that, six years at most. When he thinks about it that way, it doesn’t seem so strange that the humiliation still burns like the hot flare of a fresh slap, that he can still hear the voices of a dozen faceless men saying, _unfit for service, unfit for service, unfit, unfit, unfit_. “I mean, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

Bucky frowns. “Why’d you want to go into the army, anyway?”

Steve shrugs. “‘Cause I wanted to do the right thing. And because you were already over there.”

“I was?” Bucky narrows his eyes as if he’s paging through the depopulated file folder of his memory. “Oh yeah, I was. Inseparable on schoolyard—” he starts, the frown melting into a grin without a second’s hesitation.

“—and battlefield,” Steve finishes, grinning back just as brightly.

“So they shot you up with a serum and you got big and tall and went to fight a war.”

“Yep, that’s basically it.” Steve takes another bite of his own sandwich. He’s got almost a third of it still left.

Bucky settles back against the back of the booth and crosses his hands over his stomach, a soft curve under his t-shirt that mimics the soft curve of his spine. He looks content, satisfied, even, at the end of a good meal, relaxed into himself and watching softly as Steve eats. But then he says, “The museum didn’t say anything about you being an idiot,” and Steve almost chokes again on the last bite of his sandwich.

“You’re an asshole, Barnes,” Steve says woundedly, and as Carole Lombard appears beside the table with the check, Bucky bursts into a loud peal of laughter, a wedding-bells kind of laughter, ringing out around the quiet diner like the crack of a firework in the still night air.

He wakes up.


	4. Chapter 4

The next week is both incredibly stressful and incredibly boring at the same time. Sam and Steve ping-pong all around the eastern seaboard, from New York to the Alleghenies and down to Delaware and then Virginia, skirting around DC. They’re following whatever leads they can glean from the nightly news, visiting big Hydra bases wrapped with police tape in the dead of night, and finding nothing that hasn’t already been picked over by every intelligence agency with the resources left for picking.

Nat calls Steve their first night out of New York from an unlisted number, right after dinnertime, in order to catch him up on her movements and give him what she best suspects is Bucky’s M.O.

“Natillas,” Steve says when he thumbs the screen to accept the call. An unlisted number, it could be anybody, but there’s a phantom tingle in his thrice-broken left pinkie finger that tells him it’s not.

“Stevedore,” she says, and they both burst into giggles. They sound like two ducks quacking over breadcrumbs.

“I miss you.” Steve tries to get all of the sentiment out of the way as soon as he can because he knows that Nat will give him approximately sixty seconds of small talk before she gets down to business. It’s not that she can’t, it’s just that she doesn’t. Small talk is an anathema to her, a trick that she keeps in her spy’s tool bag next to her set of lock picks, and not engaging in it is a sign of respect, although it took Steve ages to figure that out.

“You too, Buttercup,” she says flippantly, though he knows it’s anything but.

“Now that you’re gone, I don’t have anyone to spoon me,” he whines.

“What about Sam?”

Steve gasps theatrically. “I can’t believe you’d impugn his honor like that. For shame!”

Sam looks up from where he’s sitting cross-legged on one of the motel room’s twin beds, studying a thick dossier, and frowns. “Is he frowning?” Nat says. “Does he have that cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows?”

Steve glances back over at Sam, who is still regarding him doubtfully. “Affirmative, he is frowning and there is definitely a cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows.”

Nat bursts into another peal of laughter like a handful of tossed confetti on the other end of the line, at the same time that Sam’s face does some complicated acrobatics before settling into a deeply suspicious scowl. “Tell him I miss him,” she says.

Steve pulls the phone away from his mouth. “She says she misses you,” he says, and Sam’s face does the same acrobatics, but this time in the opposite direction.

“I barely know her, but alright, I guess I miss her, too.” He tries to sound grudging, tries to keep his lips pressed into a thin line, but he’s even worse at controlling his face than Steve is.

“He misses you too,” Steve relays, although he knows that Nat can hear everything on his end. It’s part of the joke, though; you have to tell the whole thing or it’s not funny.

“Alright let’s cut the babytalk,” she says, her voice sharpening slightly, but enough that Steve hears it. Now they’re at the brass-tacks stage of the conversation. “I called to talk about Barnes.”

Steve kicks his shoes off and swivels around on his own bed so that he can lean back against the headboard. “Yeah, that’s what I figured.”

“Look, I don’t know where he is. Let’s get that out of the way first. He hasn’t been sighted anywhere, no pings on my network, no chatter on the party line. And I don’t know what he’s doing. He might be lying low, or he might have been waiting for you to get outside the perimeter of Tony’s security so that he can cut you down.”

Steve splutters a noise of protest, and he can almost hear Nat roll her eyes at the other end of the line. “Don’t interrupt. He could be halfway across the world by now, back in Siberia, Romania, Mongolia. But a few little birds of my acquaintance have mentioned that some of the smaller, backwater Hydra bases have suffered mysterious break-ins of late. Anyone in the base—we can probably assume those who were too stupid or too scared to jump ship with the rest of the rats—was knocked unconscious and tied up for the police to find while the equipment or data was destroyed methodically, by a patient and very angry hand. So I’ve drawn my conclusions. And now you’ll have to draw yours.”

Steve heaves a sigh. “I guess I’m drawing the same conclusions. I hope I am. I’d rather intercept him in West Virginia than Vladivostok.”

“Right. So, the thumb drive that Tony gave you contains an encrypted file with a list of all the Hydra bases east of the Mississippi, small and large, known to have been in operation within the last two decades, plus some more information that wasn’t in the file. Might be useful.”

“We’ll take a look. Thanks, Nat.”

There’s a pause during which he can hear some papers rustling on her end of the line. Then she asks, “Are you still having that dream?”

He doesn’t need to ask which one. There’s only one dream, has been for a couple weeks now. “Yeah, every night. Same format, though we talk about different things.”

“He always shows up?”

“Yeah, almost always. There’ve only been a couple of times where I was there by myself. And only at the beginning, not recently.”

“Hmm,” she says, and it sounds like the punctuation at the end of a sentence, but he pushes a little. Maybe she knows something he doesn’t.

“What do you mean, _hmm_?”

“Can’t a girl hmm without getting the third degree?” Her tone is cheeky, but he knows that that line of questioning has reached a dead end.

“Okay, okay. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

“You do that. Listen, Steve, don’t…” she starts, before pausing uncharacteristically. “Look. Don’t get your hopes up too much. Don’t, don’t…”

“You think I’m not going to find him?”

“You’ll find him if he wants to be found. What I’m worried about is _who_ you’ll find when you get there.”

“It’s Bucky, Nat.”

“I know that. You know that. But does he know that? If you go into this thinking you’re going to find Bucky Barnes in the treasure box buried under the X on the map, you’re doing both of you a disservice. If you go into this thinking you already know what you’re going to find at the end, you’re gonna have some rough times ahead.”

Steve breathes in deep, pays attention to the way his ribs expand, the muscle pulling tight between them. Then he says the only thing he can possibly say; in fact, it practically bursts out of him unchecked.

“If there are, we’ll all be dead.”

Nat snickers at the other end of the line. “No more rhymes now, I mean it.”

Steve pitches his voice as deep as it will go. “Anybody want a peanut?” Nat bursts out laughing again on the other end of the line, and even Sam, pretending to be engrossed in his files on the other bed, can’t stifle his chuckle.

“You were supposed to scream in rage,” Steve says to him, and Sam looks aghast.

“If you think for one second that I’m gonna be that bald pipsqueak Vizzini,” he says while Nat laughs so hard on the other end of the line that she sounds like she’s about to choke.

* * *

Steve still dreams about the diner every night. He opens the door, the bells jingle, he sits down at the table, where Bucky is waiting for him. They order food, they talk, they eat, he wakes up. In fact, the only thing that changes is that the notebook disappears. Or rather, one day Carole Lombard whisks the menu off the table, and there’s nothing but scuffed formica underneath. “Dream logic,” Bucky says with a shrug when Steve mentions it, and when the notebook fails to reappear in subsequent dreams, he finally comes to the conclusion that it had fulfilled its mysterious purpose and was no longer needed.

But the dream goes on just the same, and it’s simultaneously the best and worst part of his day, the thing that, with one hand, gives his life meaning and joy, and with the other, rips it away.

Steve spends a great part of his waking life ruminating on the dream, wondering, in spite of Sam’s professional opinion and all his reassurances to the contrary, if his subconscious is trying to tell him something. At the beginning, Bucky had been an automaton, a two-dimensional construct like a recording of himself, a video on a subtle loop that he didn’t notice until it had gone through half a dozen repetitions, only coming alive at the very end of the dream. But now, he seems more like a real person, more like someone Steve could reach out and touch, actual warm flesh for him to press his aching fingers into.

He has changed, evolved in Steve’s mind. He’s as three-dimensional as a figment of Steve’s imagination can possibly be, and Steve no longer has the feeling that if he walked around behind him, he’d find the unfinished scaffolding of a piece of stage scenery. No, he knows that what he’d find instead is the cowlick at the nape of his neck, the soft curve of the back of his jaw, the broad shoulders he still hadn’t grown into, the long, strong back tapering to a narrow waist, and the tight ass that fit in Steve’s big hands like it was made for them.

It’s almost worse this way, and each morning when he wakes up, the loss and longing sweep through him like a rip tide. No matter how much he revels in the moment, in seeing Bucky in the dream with his sun-bright grin and his shining eyes and the loose, glossy curls and the inimitable laugh that seems to bubble out of him, now, at every opportunity, no matter how much he loves it, every morning he wakes up feeling pierced to the very core of himself, Bucky’s fading grin a brand on his heart.

If he wakes up early enough and Sam is still fast asleep on the other bed on the other side of whatever shabby little motel room they’ve washed up in, sometimes he lets himself cry, the pain transubstantiated into tears that leak silently out of his eyes and soak into the pillow. A minute or two is all he ever allows himself, and then he dries his eyes and gets up to take the shower first, turning the pillow over before he goes in order to hide the evidence of his longing.

Several weeks pass this way. Sam and Steve make their way down the list, marking each base with a circle on a big fold-out map of the eastern United States that they’d bought at a gas station, and then crossing each one off when they’d checked it out. Half of the time, the bases are deserted, no sign of either current occupation or forced entry. Some of them are very old, computer equipment from the nineties covered in a thick layer of dust, no footprints on the ground, no fingerprints anywhere to speak of.

Nat’s list is exhaustive, and for good reason. There’s no telling where they might find Bucky or a clue that would help them track him down, so they have to check all the old bases, just in case. He could have gone to ground in one that he had been kept in fifteen, twenty years ago, or one he’d never seen, but which could be turned into a safe house. But there’s no sign of him in any of these decrepit bases, like he’d already known there was nothing for him there, and so he hadn’t bothered to come.

In other bases, it’s obvious he’s been and gone. They’re smoking piles of rubble on forested hillsides, warehouses with the doors kicked in and bullet holes in the walls, nice suburban bungalows from the mid-eighties with police tape across the door and the unmistakable imprint of a metal hand in the vinyl siding. They tap into law enforcement databases with the help of a mysterious link running through a VPN and a short bit of code they’d found on the USB; multiple arrests in each location, assailant unknown but the victims-slash-perpetrators left gagged on the doorstep, hands bound with zip ties, file folders full of incriminating evidence in cardboard boxes at their feet. No bodies, no deaths, just a passel of turkeys trussed and waiting for the cops to pick them up, and an astonishing amount of property damage.

Once, just once, they find a base that is currently active and hasn’t been taken out yet. It’s a couple miles outside of a run-down little industrial town on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, down in a valley nestled between two steep ridges. They’re behind the tree line on the ridge opposite the complex, which is just a few low, white buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence with a sign that says Coal Branch Chemical Plant. It’s mid-morning, the sun already hot even under the cool green shade of the trees, the cicadas droning and the mosquitoes biting all of Steve’s soft, exposed parts. He’s got his eyes glued to the binoculars watching a lab-coated man pull a cardboard file box from the trunk of a blue sedan and carry it through the side door of the biggest building.

Sam is quietly texting Nat and making notes on the back of a CVS receipt while Steve gets more and more antsy, more ready to scramble down the side of the ridge and jump the fence in just his shorts and t-shirt, kick the door of the low, white building open, bash skulls together. He’ll try not to think about the file and the chair and the sweet face rimed with frost while he’s at it, lest he kill someone accidentally.

After a moment, Sam slips the phone into his back pocket with a sigh. “We’ve got the all-clear,” he says, and Steve jumps to his feet, ready to slide down the hill in an avalanche of dead oak leaves, but Sam grabs his arm and uses it to haul himself up. “Wait a sec. No one can see our faces, they can’t know we’re involved in this, so that means no shield and no wings. No bloodshed, so we won’t be taking guns, just tasers and nightsticks. And no cops; we’re gonna take a page out of your boy’s book and truss them up and then call the pigs when we’re on our way out of town.”

Steve grins, a little too wicked, a little too angry, but he’s got it under control. He’s excited to stretch his legs, feel that deeply satisfying _thwack_ of his fist connecting with a face that deserves it. “Fine. Let’s go.”

It’s easy, except for the part where the lab-coated man seems to know a little jujutsu. He manages to get Sam on the ground and is pulling a switchblade from an inside pocket when Steve gets an arm around his neck. He subdues the guy almost immediately and it only takes half a minute to tie him up, but it’s not until they’re back in the car that he realizes he’s got a long, nasty-looking gash running up the back of his hand and halfway to his elbow.

“I think you need stitches,” Sam says, but Steve just rolls his eyes and slaps on a couple of butterfly bandages and waits for the serum to do the rest. It barely even hurts.

* * *

That night, when Steve slides into the booth, Bucky immediately zeros in on his hand, the smile dropping off his face and an expression of flinty concern taking its place.

“What’s that?” he asks in a tone that makes Steve want to snap to attention.

He looks down. There’s a long, dark red line running up the back of his hand and into his shirtsleeve, a thin scab on top of a nearly-healed wound. “Oh,” Steve says. Strange that a wound would follow him into the dream world, when the rest of his body does not.

“What happened?” Bucky asks again, and looks up at him, his mouth pressed into a thin line, his eyes unyielding.

“Oh, uh,” Steve says, not wanting, for some inexplicable reason, to confess his comings and goings. “It’ll be gone tomorrow, remember what you saw in the museum about the serum? It means I heal real quick.”

Bucky hums doubtfully, but doesn’t press the issue. He just clenches his jaw and looks out the window, his face palely illuminated by the dim light of a cloudy day. “Yeah, uh, me too,” he says after a minute. “I can heal from almost anything.” He says the last part almost proudly, but Steve thinks about how that information was obtained, and it makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Later, after Carole Lombard has brought their club sandwiches—big thick ones with an inch and a half of turkey—and they’re nearly finished, Bucky abandons their argument about whether a club sandwich is better than a BLT to say, out of the blue, “Hey, you need to take better care of yourself.”

Steve bristles immediately, but Bucky looks down at his hand and then back up at his face and raises his eyebrows, challenging him to disagree.

He does disagree—he wasn’t actually doing anything reckless at the time. In fact, he was saving Sam’s life. But he supposes this is just his way of reminding himself that while he might be functionally immortal, he _can_ be killed.

He doesn’t… he doesn’t need the reminder, though, not really. Not anymore. That’s changed, since he found out that Bucky was alive.

“You’re right,” he says, swallowing his irritation and letting only his resignation leak through in his voice.

Bucky’s expression softens, and he looks back down at Steve’s hand where it’s lying relaxed on the table with something like warmth on his face. “Just, wouldn’t want you to get hurt bad, that’s all.”

“I know.” Steve eyes catch for the umpteenth time on the missing button at Bucky’s throat, the bit of cloth tugged up by the now-broken thread. He’d never learned how it had gone missing, and he’s not sure that Bucky himself ever knew. At any rate, Steve had never mentioned it. He’d just carried that empty space around in his heart, and over time it had come to represent something that he couldn’t even define to himself. It was like the space left behind when a tooth was knocked out, a hole that was more solid in its unbeing than the tooth itself ever was.

Bucky follows his eyes, then moves the hand not holding his sandwich up to his neck. His fingers are long and strong, the back of his hand dusted with freckles over the tendons that run in elegant ridges down to his wrist. Steve watches as he touches the divot at the base of his throat and asks, shyly, “What are you looking at?”

_At the void you left in my life when you died,_ Steve thinks. _At the awkward way I’m trying to fill it by dreaming of you every night, when the real you is still out of reach. At a figment of my imagination._

Like magic, Carole Lombard appears beside the table with the check. As she lays it facedown beside his plate, he says, “Nothing,” unable to find the strength to make the smile on his face reaches his eyes. Who is there to tell, besides himself? “Nothing at all.”

He wakes up.

* * *

Steve comes through the door of the diner, bells jingling, to find Bucky in his usual spot at their table with the smile on his face as wide and as bright as ever. But Steve finds that he can’t match the brightness watt for watt. It’s been a very long, hard few weeks, the dreams of Bucky both a respite and a torture. He closes his eyes every night in a different motel and waits with sick anticipation for sleep to take him and the door of the diner to open under the press of his hand, but it hurts to see Bucky so happy and healthy and carefree, cracking jokes about Steve’s drawing abilities and tucking into his food with gusto. It hurts because he knows that the real Bucky is wandering around North America, raiding Hydra bases with a single-minded violence, possibly hungry, tired, confused. He’s obviously with-it enough to know what he’s doing; the carefully-ravaged Hydra bases and the woozy, terrified people zip-tied together on the sidewalks outside are proof enough.

But does he know who he is? Does he know why he’s doing this, besides some instinctual need to obliterate his former captors from the face of the earth? Does he remember Steve? Does he think about Steve sometimes? If he does remember, then why… why doesn’t he come back?

All this runs through his head, the same train of thoughts chasing its tail in circles like it has been for the last few weeks, when he walks through the door.

And like always, the Bucky-construct mirrors his own emotions uncannily, fills in the blanks in Steve’s partly-cloudy smile like he’s reading Steve’s mind. He _is_ Steve’s mind, of course he knows what Steve is thinking. The only surprising thing should be how seamless it is in the dream, how easily he pulls Steve out of himself.

His smile is already fading as Steve slides into the booth, though the friendly openness remains. “What’s wrong?”

If this were really Bucky, Steve would try to hide it, to be strong, to be someone that Bucky could rely on, not someone that needs an arm slung round his back to keep him from collapsing. But this is just a figment of his imagination, as he’s reminded every morning when he wakes up. There’s no real reason why he should hide from himself. “I was just thinking that it’s too bad this is just a dream and you’re not actually real.”

Bucky narrows his eyes and frowns. He looks a little miffed, as if Steve had told him that he’d done a poor job making the bed. “What do you mean, this is just a dream and I’m not actually real?” he says. He looks more offended than miffed now, a hallucination insulted by his own unreality. “You’re the one who’s not actually real.”

The diner seems dim today, or rather, the sun isn’t pouring brightly through the windows like it usually does. There’s no provident ray of sunlight to throw Bucky’s face into stark relief, nothing to lengthen the lines of his eyelashes or highlight the apples of his cheeks, but he’s still beautiful in a way that Steve would never be able to describe and is barely able to capture with pencil and paper. The frown pushes his bottom lip out into a plump little cushion with the wet sheen of an exotic fruit that Steve can’t name, though he knows exactly what it tastes like. His narrowed eyes look dark, the blue swallowed up by his rose-petal lids, only the velvety black of his pupils in view.

Steve swallows heavily, and it sounds like the crash of a handful of silverware in his ears. “That’s exactly what a figment of my imagination would say,” he says, powering through the swirling mix of longing and arousal and sadness and embarrassment.

But then Bucky, miraculous, mercurial Bucky, bursts out laughing and everything changes. The sun comes out from behind the clouds, a ray falling from the zenith straight onto the table between them. Carole Lombard drops the menu off while Bucky says, grinning with all his teeth, “Shut up. I don’t know how to convince you, but I’m not a figment of your imagination. You’re a figment of mine.”

Steve feels like a switch has flipped, his polarity has reversed, and now he’s gone from longing and sadness to flippant familiarity. “You don’t need to convince me, Dream Bucky,” he says with a magnanimous wave of his hand.

Bucky frowns again, but it’s not the dark look from before; it’s contemplative, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle. “No, seriously. I… this isn’t a dream.” He pulls the plump fruit of his bottom lip between his teeth and bites at it; Steve can’t tear his eyes away from the flush. “I mean, it is a dream. But I’m real. Like I said, you’re the one who’s a figment of _my_ imagination.”

Steve closes his eyes but Bucky is imprinted on the back of his lids like a photographic negative. He scrubs his hands over his face and lets out a gusty sigh. “Wait, let’s pause for a second. What are we going to order today?” A week ago, he’d found—and subsequently memorized—an exhaustive list of sandwiches on Wikipedia. He pulls one out of the file at random, ”How about a jambon-beurre?”

Bucky shrugs and nods as Carole Lombard magically appears at the table and takes their order, whisking the menu away back behind the bar.

“Okay,” Steve says, setting his hands flat on the table. “Prove it to me.”

“How?”

He thinks for a minute. What if this were really Bucky? What’s the first thing he’d do? “Tell me where you are.”

Bucky doesn’t ask what he means; he knows straightaway. He doesn’t look upset or angry, but his face settles into a sort of stillness that makes a nervous fist clench in the pit of Steve’s stomach. “Why?”

“Because...” He thinks for a moment about how to phrase it. “I want to see you.”

The stillness remains, deep and dark like a pool of water in a cave far below the surface of the Earth. “You don’t,” Bucky finally says. “You don’t want to see me.” He says it sternly, like he’s trying to change Steve’s mind by force of will, but then immediately ruins the effect by asking, “Why?”

Steve wants to skip a stone across the face of that pool of water, he wants to skim his hand over the surface so that the disturbing stillness is broken up into a hundred thousand points of light. “What do you mean, why?” he asks, as if the answer is the most obvious thing in the world. “Because you’re my best friend.”

Carole Lombard appears at that moment with their sandwiches, two perfect half-baguettes with crunchy, flour-dusted crusts, stuffed with ham and slathered with salted butter. Savory ham, crisp-soft bread, all underlaid by the slick-salt taste of good, fat butter. They’re delicious.

They eat in silence for a few minutes, and Bucky finishes half of his sandwich in no time at all. Then he sets the rest down on his plate and wipes the crumbs from his face with a napkin. “I’m not your best friend,” he says, picking up the conversational flow without a pause. It’s like Steve had gone to skip a rock, but it had sunk instead, swallowed up by the dark water without a splash.

He feels a surge of irritation, but tempered with a twist of worry. “Don’t you remember the museum?” He sets the remains of his own sandwich down on his plate and gestures with his hands in the air, blocking out the square frame of a video screen. “Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield…”

Bucky finally breaks, then, the irritation and distress rippling across his smooth, round face. He leans over the table, tapping the forefinger of his left hand on the scuffed tabletop for emphasis. “Steve, listen to me. That was eighty years ago. It was the last fucking century. I’m not…” He leans back and swallows heavily, not meeting Steve’s eye, looking absently toward the window; the clouds have covered the face of the sun again and the ray of light is gone. “I’m not that guy anymore. You don’t know what Hydra did to me.”

Steve leans back himself, crosses his arms over his chest, and keeps his eyes trained on the side of Bucky’s face. He’s so beautiful, even in distress, that Steve feels like crying. His bone structure is architectural, the graceful curve of his cheek in profile like a flying buttress holding up the warm, soft cathedral of his face. “I do,” Steve says.

Bucky darts a glance at him before he goes back to looking out the window. “Do what?”

“I know what Hydra did to you. Nat… the Widow, she did me a favor, pulled some strings, got me your file.”

Bucky turns around to face him again, confusion and distress writ plain across his face. “What file?”

“She said it came from Kiev.”

“Holy shit,” Bucky whispers. It’s obvious he knows what file Steve’s talking about. Has he read it himself? Maybe he doesn’t need to; he’s lived the whole thing, after all.

“Yeah. I read it,” Steve admits. “Probably a dozen times because I’m a sick bastard who doesn’t know when to let a thing go. So… I know.”

“Oh.” Bucky says it plainly, not like it’s a relief, but not like it’s a burden, either. It’s just knowledge, plain and simple. Steve knows, Bucky knows that Steve knows.

Steve realizes, not with a start but with something like dispassionate inevitability, that he’s already treating Bucky like he’s real and not just a figment of his imagination. Though whether it’s because Bucky had confirmed some unacknowledged suspicion deep inside him, or if it’s his desperation finally getting the better of him, or if _take it at face value_ is finally reaching its logical conclusion, he doesn’t know.

“Yeah,” is all he can find to say. Then he does what he’s wanted to do for weeks, now, for years, actually, when it was still an impossibility. He reaches out his hand, lays it palm up on the table between them. But not with his fingers curled and lax, comforting and reassuring like he’d done before. This time he spreads them wide, a clear invitation. Bucky hesitates, but not for long, and then carefully lays the pads of his fingers on Steve’s own.

Something passes between them like the sharp prick of a static shock, and Steve feels a hum deep in his marrow, like Bucky is a live wire and Steve is the conduit that grounds him. It fades after just a moment and becomes the memory of an electric spark, but it’s still there if he concentrates, a subsonic purr. Bucky is looking at their fingers, a thoughtful set to his pretty face.

“That’s my metal hand,” he says after a moment.

“I don’t care. It’s yours. I love it.” Steve can’t help himself, he curls his thumb up and strokes Bucky’s forefinger, from the second knuckle down to the smooth, pink nail.

“What do you mean, you love it,” Bucky says. He’s still looking at their hands touching in the middle of the table.

Steve feels a little twinge in his stomach; has he gone too far? “You’re my best friend, I already told you.”

“Yeah, but…” He trails off and drums his fingers against Steve’s own. Then he glances up at Steve and pulls his hand back, tucking it into his lap under the table and out of sight. “Look, I think something weird is going on here.”

Steve reluctantly pulls his own hand back. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t think this is a normal dream. You say you’re the one who’s real, and I say I’m the one who’s real. But I think we’re both real.”

“That’s…”

“I know.”

Steve’s heart feels like it’s been thrust back into the past along with the rest of his body; it beats erratically, a lopsided hop-skip like the gait of a three-legged dog. “Can we prove it?” he asks.

Bucky bites his bottom lip again, an unconscious gesture, but it looks so sensual that Steve has to look away. He can’t… if this is really Bucky, he shouldn’t… But Bucky interrupts his train of thought. “Look. Gimme your phone number. I’ll send you a text, maybe tomorrow. If you get it, you’ll know that it’s really me.”

“Oh… uh, sure. That’s easy. Um…” He rattles his number off, and Bucky repeats it back to him to make sure he’s got it memorized.

“But we need a code,” he says, “something that could rule out any sort of coincidence or interference.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Carole Lombard walk around the edge of the bar with their check in her hand. “Shit, we’re running out of time. Uh, how about ‘Carole Lombard jambon-beurre,’” he says, glancing between their sandwiches still sitting half-finished on their plates.

“Carole Lombard jambon-beurre,” Bucky repeats with a grin as Carole Lombard lays the check facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wikipedia's [List of Sandwiches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sandwiches), in case you get hungry


	5. Chapter 5

It’s Steve’s turn to drive, so he wedges himself into the front seat of their little car and pulls out of the gas station parking lot, turning on his blinker to merge into the nonexistent traffic on this stretch of highway.

They’re driving through Illinois on their way to a base outside of Springfield, having gone lengthways through the whole of Kentucky because Sam had read that there was a town called Metropolis on the other side of the Ohio River that had a 15-foot-tall statue of Superman. He’d made Steve take a picture of him posing in front of it, and then he’d cajoled and threatened until Steve had posed, too, fists on his hips and looking off into the distance as if he’d seen a suspicious pigeon perched on a cornice down the block. It had cost them an extra few hours on the road, but Steve hadn’t minded because Sam deserved it.

Steve’s phone buzzes in the center console and Sam picks it up, but he barely notices. He’s concentrated on driving, and his higher-level brain functions are all caught up in thinking about the last base they’d taken down, outside of Elizabethtown. It was a server farm, and there had only been one person inside, a scared kid keeping the cooling fans running and nothing to defend himself with but a broken table leg.

He’s thinking about how old he’d been when he signed up to go to war, but then Sam says, “Carole Lombard jambon-beurre, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” and Steve’s brain snaps back into place like a fresh rubber band.

He almost loses control of the car, swerving half into the next lane over, but there’s no one else on the road and he manages to get the car safely to a stop in the margin before he’s throwing the door open and stumbling out, falling to his hands and knees in the scrubby strip of wildflowers between the highway and the cornfield standing tall and green beyond a low wire fence.

He vaguely hears Sam get out of the car and run around to shut the driver’s side door before he comes over to where Steve is sitting, trembling like a stalk of grass and trying to keep his lunch down. “What the hell, Steve? What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Carole Lombard jambon-beurre,” he says, and promptly bursts into tears.

Poor, dear Sam sits down next to him on the burning gravel and lets himself be pulled into a half-hug, Steve hanging around his neck with both arms while he tries to get himself under control. Eventually, he’s able to sit up properly, hiccupping, and wipe at his eyes with his fists like a huge toddler.

He looks out over the cornfield next to the road while his eyes sting and the tears dry on his skin. It’s still a few weeks too early for the corn to be really ripe, but each tall stalk carries two or three fat ears, the silk still glossy and fresh. They look like Myrmidons, rows upon rows of them frozen in mid-march, following on the heels of Achilles on his way to Troy. From where he’s sitting, he can see straight down the row directly in front of him, a narrow corridor with leafy green walls that recede into the distance and finally meet at a vanishing point that even his inhuman eyes can’t see beyond.

“I repeat,” says Sam, drawing him out of his reverie, “what the hell.”

“Bucky, from my dream. He’s real.”

“Yeah?” He sounds cautious, but not disbelieving, and Steve is overpowered by a wave of gratitude for Sam and his preternatural understanding.

“I mean… fuck.” He scrubs his hands up and down over his hot, red face. “It’s like ninety-five degrees out here. Let’s go sit in the AC and I’ll tell you.”

They get in the car, Sam going around to the driver’s side without a word.

Once they’re back into the relative coolness, the A/C running full-blast, sweat drying cold on his forehead, Steve heaves a huge sigh and says, “Last night, we established that we both thought the other one was the one who wasn’t real, and that we were each the real one in the dream.”

Sam says, “Sounds complicated.”

“Just wait,” Steve laughs tiredly. He feels like an old string mop being put through the wringer for the thousandth time. “So, then Bucky said we should try to prove it, that I should give him my number and he’d text me a code, and we decided on ‘Carole Lombard jambon-beurre,’ because that’s who the waitress looks like, and that’s what we were eating in the dream.”

“Are…” Sam hesitates. _Hesitates to call me crazy straight to my face_ , Steve thinks. “Are you sure you didn’t…”

“Sam, I didn’t imagine it. Who would have texted me ‘Carole Lombard jambon-beurre’ out of the blue like that? That’s why we picked a code and not just something like ‘Hey, it’s me.’ And anyway…” He reaches around into the back seat and drags his backpack into the front, unzipping it and pulling out his notebook. “I wrote it down this morning when I woke up, just in case I forgot.” He opens to the last page and hands the book to Sam. _Bucky: Carole Lombard Jambon-beurre_ , it says in his neat handwriting at the top of the page, under the list of things they need to pick up at the next drugstore they run across.

Sam whistles, hands the notebook back to Steve. “Man, this is some weird shit. Are you gonna call him?”

“Oh fuck,” Steve says, scrabbling under the handbrake for his phone. “I didn’t even think about that.”

“Maybe send him a text first,” Sam says. “Calling is, like, serious business.”

“Yeah, okay.” His fingers tremble as he unlocks the phone and types out, to the unknown number, _Hey Buck, I guess we’re both real._

The typing bubbles do their little dance for a full minute before there’s a reply: _See you in the dream, then :)_

He feels almost sick with anticipation as he pecks out _How are you doing?,_ but immediately a red bar pops up: _Message undeliverable_. His heart sinks into the bottom of his old, worn-out sneakers. “Oh.”

He hands the phone to Sam and looks out the passenger-side window, biting at the tender inside of his bottom lip, trying to keep a fresh wave of tears at bay. He feels like a kicked dog, but he’s not angry; he understands. Or he thinks he understands, but it hurts, all the same.

Sam gently sets the phone back down on Steve’s thigh and then thumbs through his own phone for a few minutes, giving Steve as much time as he needs to sniff and surreptitiously wipe his eyes. When Steve finally shifts in his seat and looks straight forward out the windshield again, Sam says, “I think you should get in contact with Nat. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is weird as hell.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Steve picks his notebook back up and flips to the front. Taped to the inside of the cover is a business card, white with bold red-and-green letters and a crude cartoon of a tiny mouse in a chef’s hat sitting on a plate of spaghetti holding a meatball. CASA DELLA PIZZA, it says across the top, and then an address, 231 E. 31st St., and then a New York phone number.

Steve opens a blank email in the mail app on his phone and writes _I’d like to make a reservation for two at Casa della Pizza, today, if possible, between_ —he glances up at the time on the dashboard, it’s 3:34 p.m.— _3:00 pm and 7:00 pm. Thank you!_

He addresses the email to the string of digits in the phone number @gmail.com and then presses the button that whisks it away. Now all he has to do is wait.

Sam has pulled carefully back onto the highway, and they’re speeding along past hypnotic rows of corn broken occasionally by a dirt road with a lonely mailbox at the end when the phone rings. Steve’s heart jumps, he can’t help it, even if he knows, he _knows_ , it’s not Bucky. He thumbs over the screen to accept the call.

“Hello?”

“Casa della Pizza, I’m sorry for the delay, we’re incredibly busy today,” Nat says in a horrific Italian accent. There are hisses and crackles on the line; Steve doesn’t know where she is or how the call is being routed, but she’s clearly not in Kansas, anymore. He doesn’t feel like joking, though, not with his heart simultaneously in his throat and in his shoes.

“Nat, Bucky in my dream is real. He’s really Bucky. We decided to do an experiment and it worked, it’s really him.”

“Tell me,” she says, her voice dropping into its serious register, and he does.

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line when he’s done. He knows the line hasn’t cut out and she hasn’t hung up because the crickety crackles are still singing in his ear, but it takes a full minute before she says, “Alright. I need to tap into your phone now, stay on the line, don’t hang up, okay? I’ll tell you when I’m done.” Then she falls silent again.

Steve keeps the phone up to his ear, listening to the static. Is it radiation interfering with the signal? Something in the atmosphere? He imagines Nat on Mars, wearing a bulky spacesuit with a big bubble helmet, talking to him through a headset and peering at the Earth rising above the Martian horizon. She can’t see him, not from Mars—the Earth would be nothing more than an especially bright astral body, but he feels it anyway, her benevolent gaze shining down from the heavens.

He closes his eyes for a moment, but then the unswerving, unchanging forward acceleration of the car starts to get under his skin, and he has to open them again, just to remind himself that they’re moving.

But looking ahead of them as the car eats up the miles of pavement, still in corn country, perpetually in corn country, he feels like they’re in the movies. Like Sam is driving and the countryside is rolling past, but their car is sitting on blocks and the endless corn is nothing but a canvas backdrop rotating perpetually around two tall cylinders just out of his field of view. A light vertigo hits him suddenly in the pit of his stomach and he has to close his eyes and swallow hard around the little thread of nausea that he feels climbing up his throat.

“Are you…” he starts, but Nat interrupts him.

“You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles,” she says in a New York drawl so thick it sends a pang of homesickness dashing after the nausea. “But yeah, I got it.”

The line hisses and pops, and Steve feels absurdly grateful for the jerk back to reality. “I’ve got the number,” she goes on, “which is good. But the bad news is that the SIM it belongs to is on the bottom of the French Broad River in Asheville.”

“But that means…”

“All it means is that he was near the French Broad thirty minutes ago. Nothing else.”

Steve swallows hard again, the nausea turning into a hard knot of distress in his throat. “What can we do?”

“Now? Nothing. I’m not in a position to drop what I’m doing and run down to North Carolina.”

He looks out the window at the corn marching past, always corn, forever and ever. “And we’re halfway across the goddamn country.”

“Yep.”

“Fuck.” He can see Sam glance over at him, pulling his eyes away from the road, a little worried crease appearing on his forehead. “What now?”

“Now? You wait. You find a motel, or maybe a hotel, I think you can treat yourself tonight. You have a big dinner, maybe watch some TV. Then you lie back in your big fluffy bed on your plump pillows and you fall asleep. Then you have the dream again, and tomorrow you call and you tell me about it.”

“Aren’t you… why aren’t you freaking out? Isn’t this weird?” he asks plaintively.

Nat makes a noise of derision on the other end of the line. “Sure, it’s weird. But do you remember two years ago when a big portal opened up over Manhattan and a space whale came out? Did you forget the Tesseract? Or that you work with a god from another planet? What’s a little dreamsharing to all that?”

“Ah,” he says.

“’Ah’ is right.” She laughs at him, but it’s fond, and he feels her sisterly condescension like a warm hand on the crown of his head. “We should probably get to the bottom of it, but right this minute, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Well, what should… what should I say to him? Tonight?”

“I don’t know, Steve. I can’t tell you that. Try to find out where he is, or don’t. Honesty, I’m not sure you’ll get a straight answer. I still think he doesn’t want to be found, not yet.”

Steve makes a noise of pain and frustration, an animal caught in a trap of its own making. “Anything else?”

“No, and you don’t even need to ask where he is. Just… just be yourself, Steve. Draw him out. Make careful note of what he says. And then tell me tomorrow.”

“Okay. Okay, fine.”

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. He waves to Carole Lombard, standing behind the bar; she waves back, gives him a smile, and points to his booth.

Bucky’s already sitting there, turned around with his head tilted up, looking over the back of the booth and catching Steve’s eye. Steve can see that he’s smiling, just from the way the corner of his eye wrinkles. He strides on over, and when he rounds the corner of the booth, Bucky is looking up at him, a palpable air of excitement around him like a cloud of buzzing gnats.

“Well?” he says, before Steve even slides all the way into his seat.

“Well, I guess you’re real.”

“Well, I guess you’re real, too,” Bucky says. He seems nervous and excited, his senses on high alert, his eyes flicking around the diner and back to rest on Steve for a moment in a way that Steve hasn’t seen for a while.

Steve feels bowled over for a moment by the realization that everything he’d attributed to his imagination, to the burning desire of his subconscious to see Bucky in real life, was actually Bucky himself. The unconscious threat assessment he’s doing on the diner at the moment, the light behind his eyes when Steve had said his name for the first time, how he didn’t know how to eat a roast dinner, and that first time, when he began to shiver, his lips blue. _Who the hell is Bucky?_

 _Was I talking to him in cryo?_ Steve thinks wildly, desperately, as his eyes start to swim, the light in the diner growing murkier, a cloud passing over the face of the sun.

He’s staring down at his hands clenching and unclenching in his lap when a movement out of the corner of his eye makes him look up. Bucky has extended his hand across the table, palm up, fingers loosely curled. Not asking, just waiting. He doesn’t say anything.

Steve takes a deep breath, wills the lump in his throat to dissolve, and brings his own hand up, his right one, to Bucky’s left. He stretches it across the table, and when their fingers touch, he feels the same spark run through him again, dynamic and energizing. But this time, it’s less like electricity and more like fire, a small, bright, golden thing like the lighted fuse of a firework, spiraling up and up before it explodes into a glittering flower.

He hears Bucky’s sharp intake of breath on the other side of the table, but Steve doesn’t look up; he watches his own fingers as they curl around Bucky’s long, nimble ones, plump pink pads and smooth coral nails. But superimposed, somehow, is the faint shadow of lines crisscrossing his palm and climbing up his forearm, underlaid by the soft blue veins that disappear into the ragged green cuff of his shirt. Metallic, like lines of solder, or delicate leading between the panes of a stained-glass window. Then he blinks, and they’re gone.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s fingers in his own and then looks up, meeting his eye. “This is some weird shit.”

“I know.” God, it’s really Bucky, he’s really looking at Bucky, those are really his eyes, thoughtful and kind, looking at Steve as if Steve knows something, anything, anything at all besides the shrill squeal echoing between his ears, as if his brain were a stuck pig.

“Do you have any idea…”

“No.” He wishes he did.

“Me neither.”

Carole Lombard comes over with the menu and they both sit back on their respective benches, fingers parting to give her room to set it down in front of Steve. He holds up a hand, though, motioning for her to wait; he’s already thought about what they’re going to order. “How about barbecue sandwiches?” he asks Bucky.

“Sure, sounds good,” Bucky says with a shrug.

Steve looks up into Carol Lombard’s sunny face. “Two ice waters and two barbecue sandwiches, Carolina style.” He doesn’t look at Bucky when he says it, wasn’t even sure that he was going to say it until it came out of his mouth. But he can see Bucky out of the corner of his eye, and he sees the way he turns his head sharply from the big plate-glass window and looks in Steve’s direction.

When Carole Lombard vanishes and Steve turns back toward him, though, his face is set in the friendly, open receptiveness that Steve has come to expect from his dream self, not rising to the bait, not even acknowledging that the bait was there to begin with. Steve clears his throat and says, internally, _Oh well._ “I had this dream a few times without you, you know.”

Bucky furrows his brow and leans his elbows on the table. “Oh really? When?”

“The night you shot Fury. I saw you on the roof. That was the first time.” Bucky looks troubled, and watching his eyes, Steve wonders how he could possibly have failed to recognize them; he had thought they were written on his very soul, petroglyphs carved into the soft limestone of his calcified heart. He had drawn them from memory hundreds of times before he ever saw them again, and yet…

“And the next night, I was here by myself again. The night after the fight on the bridge, that was the first time we were here together. After your mask came off.”

Bucky looks down at the table and scratches at an imaginary spot of grime with his thumbnail. “Hmm.”

Steve doesn’t want to push him too far, but he feels like he needs to push a little, just enough to test how much give there is in the warp and weft of Bucky’s newly-rediscovered self. “Do you remember that dream?”

Bucky still doesn’t look up. He’s given up on the spot of grime and has cradled his hands together on the tabletop, his right thumb rubbing a circle over his left palm. “I don’t know. I… they always wiped me before they sent me out again. I remember something. I remembered you, I asked about the man on the bridge, I think. But memories between wipes are… they’re not reliable. Like, like an afterimage. Barely there.” He’s staring at the salt and pepper shakers, his thumb making a nearly-imperceptible whisper as it circles round the lines on his palm.

Steve decides he should probably change the subject, but at that moment, Carole Lombard comes back with their sandwiches.

Bucky perks up a little, though a haunted shadow still clings to the corners of his mouth. He looks, not exactly older, but a little more broken down than he had been ten minutes before. Steve curses himself for his tactless questions and his big, interfering mouth and they start on their sandwiches in silence.

After a minute, he starts, “Once…” and then pauses.

Bucky looks up from his sandwich expectantly, and Steve is overwhelmed by the feeling that Bucky is hanging on his every word, waiting for an explanation, a direction, something. It scares him and simultaneously fills him with a sense of purpose that he hasn’t felt in a long time. It’s different to the sense of purpose that had flooded him when Bucky’s mask had come off during the fight at the bridge. That was a purpose full of vengeance, and a compulsion to search and find and take and keep. Now, what he feels is a sense of responsibility, to take care of Bucky in this strangely distant way, to be the lighthouse in the foggy night.

He starts over again. “The first time I saw you here, you didn’t recognize me, and then at the end of the dream you started to shiver, your lips turned blue, like you were cold. Were you… did you dream? When they put you in cryo?”

Bucky turns his face toward the window. Steve briefly wonders what the weather’s like on the East Coast; in Illinois, it had been brightly sunny, nothing to break the monotony of brilliant blue except for a few fat white clouds sailing overhead. But there’s hardly any light coming into the diner from outside, now. The only illumination comes from the dim 60-watt bulbs in the dusty brass lamps hanging overhead, the light a dull incandescent yellow. Outside, it’s dark, like the five minutes right before a thunderstorm hits.

“I… I don’t remember that. I mean, I don’t remember that dream. But I’m pretty sure I never dreamed in cryo. Sometimes, though, they’d wipe me too hard and I’d black out before they shoved me in the tube. That’s… that’s probably what happened.”

“Fuck,” Steve whispers. There are two feelings warring inside his chest: the sharp, jagged pain of a stab wound and the bright, rounded giddiness of a pink jacks ball. It hurts him terribly to think of everything that happened to Bucky while he, himself, was prancing around in his tights and helmet, unawares. But at the same time, the fact that they’re here together, the fact that Bucky’s here in the future at all…

This isn’t how he envisioned this conversation going; in fact, when he thinks that this is really their first meeting, the first time they’ve seen each other face-to-face and _known_ it, he kicks himself for bringing the tone down, for making Bucky’s face look like that. When Steve had walked in the door, his face had been bright and excited, just waiting to conspire with him about this weird dream they’ve been sharing each night, and now it’s solemn and downcast. He’s chewing his sandwich methodically, not looking like he’s really enjoying it. Steve casts about frantically for something nice to talk about.

“So, when I first woke up from the ice,” he starts, and when Bucky glances up at him, Steve’s heart warms to see the way a quick flash of interest brightens his face. He continues, after taking another bite of his sandwich, “Everything was really confusing, I’d just jumped seventy years into the future and everything was so different. Actually, they tried to pretend like it was still the 40s, they put me in this little room with the radio playing a baseball game, but everything about it was wrong, and I ran away, right into Times Square.” Bucky is staring at him, his sandwich halfway to his mouth. “You know what Times Square looks like?” Steve asks, because maybe he doesn’t. But Bucky nods and keeps staring at him, as if Steve is telling the most fascinating story he’s ever heard.

“Right, so it was a huge shock. And then lots of stuff happened, blah blah blah”—he waves his hand in the air and then takes another bite of his sandwich—“but a little little while later Nat, uh, the Widow, she cornered me after a mission and asked if I’d seen Star Wars yet. And when I said I hadn’t, she told me to keep a list of future things that people mentioned that interested me. Because I needed a whole lifetime’s worth of cultural education, you see, and nobody had thought to give it to me.”

He realizes he’s been talking a lot, too much, and takes a too-big bite out of his sandwich, almost choking on the soft hamburger bun that fills his mouth like a rarified cloud. Bucky’s still looking at him, and Steve’s not sure if he’s waiting for Steve to keep going, but as his coughs dwindle down to nothing and he can finally swallow a little of his imprudent mouthful, Bucky says, “So what’s on the list?”

“Oh, lots of stuff, music and books and movies and things to eat. Some of the movies I’ve already seen, I just want to remember to watch them again. Uh, there was tex-mex and thai food, and Beyoncé and something called Eurovision that I haven’t figure out yet. And Toy Story, Jurassic Park, The Princess Bride. I love that one, it’s the best movie I’ve seen since I woke up.” Bucky’s still looking at him, but the staring has been transmuted into something softer. “You’d like it,” Steve says.

And then, to his shock and delight, Bucky puts his forgotten sandwich down on the plate and gazes off into the distance and says, “Mawidge… that dweam within a dweam.”

Steve can feel his jaw drop open; it practically falls off and clangs on the floor. “You’ve seen it??” he squeals, dignity abandoned in a rush of surprise and elation.

Bucky grins a shy little grin. “It was, uh, it was on the TV. I only saw it once.”

Steve doesn’t even think to ask what TV or where. “Oh my god. Oh my god! You should watch it again. It gets better every time.”

Bucky looks back down at his plate, his hands clasped out of sight under the table, and if Steve didn’t know any better, he’d say that Bucky was actually squirming in embarrassed pleasure.

It’s sweet and endearing, and Steve realizes all of a sudden that he is in trouble. Big fucking trouble. It was one thing to moon over a figment of his imagination, something that existed in dreams and stayed in dreams and was nothing more than a tarnished mirror held up to Steve’s own soul, but this…

Bucky is alive in the real world and real in the dream world and Steve is on the cusp of falling in love with him all over again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Carole Lombard come around the corner of the counter with their check. “A dream within a dream,” he murmurs, and Bucky looks up at him, his eyes like two bits of sea glass in the light streaming in through the window—the sky has cleared and the clouds have hurried off to other climes. A smile, warm and happy and glowing from within spreads across his face as Carole Lombard sets the check down on the table.

He wakes up.

* * *

He opens his eyes when his alarm goes off, a quiet chime that he’d chosen for its objectively soothing qualities, but which never fails to tighten the little knot of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. A new day, a new start, a hundred new ways for it all to go wrong.

He’s lying in a big bed, a little too soft and a little too big and smelling like industrial laundry detergent, but he’s alone in the room and he takes a minute to glory in it. They’d taken Nat’s advice and found an actual hotel on the outskirts of Springfield, just a chain, nothing fancy, but miles better than the run-down motels they’d been sleeping in. Sam had got his own room, since they were splurging, and had bowed out early after a makeshift dinner of Domino’s eaten on Steve’s bed in front of the big TV. Steve had been left to his own devices, channel surfing for a while, then pulling out his e-reader and trying to concentrate on the political machinations of the Culture, then just lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, trying not to think.

Eventually, he had fallen asleep.

_Well, I guess you’re real, too._

He’d set the alarm last night, thinking that he could get some exercise in before they get back into the car for the umpteenth time, but now he doesn’t feel like getting up to look for the hotel gym. Instead, he thinks about Bucky, the stained-glass lines on his arm, the bright spark jumping between their outstretched fingertips. He slides a hand under the sheet and palms himself without even thinking about it, and then yanks his hand back guiltily when he realizes what he’s doing.

He hasn’t… it’s been a long time since he’s jerked off. First, because he’s been sharing a room with Sam for the last month, and second, because he’s just been too sad. It’s hard to get it up when he feels like his blood has turned into something thick and sluggish in his veins, and the effervescent heat he usually feels when an orgasm is on the horizon is nowhere to be found.

But something feels different today. Some of the sadness has lifted, a layer of organdy pulled aside to reveal the sharper silhouette of the unseen body underneath. He feels, for the first time in months, the heat stirring in the pit of his belly, sweet and tart.

But he still feels guilty; he can’t think about Bucky, not the way he is in the dream, not the way Steve imagines him to be now. That’s just… that’s a line he can’t bring himself to cross—yet.

There’s plenty of other material to draw from, though.

He slides his hand back down again, under the sheet and under the waistband of his boxers, stroking the inside of his thigh, tugging lightly at the thick curls of hair between his legs, but not touching his cock. He closes his eyes against the murky early-morning light leaking in around the heavy velveteen curtains and thinks about their first kiss.

It was 1936, early fall, a couple of months after Steve’s ma had died. He’d been living in their tiny apartment all by himself, barely covering the rent with the meagre living he eked out clerking at the grocer’s and eating day’s-end cast-offs supplemented with Sunday dinner at Bucky’s house.

Bucky had come over after work with a quarter of a roast chicken with potatoes and carrots in a covered dish, saying his ma had just happened to make extra and thought that Steve might be able to make room for it, but as soon as he walked through the door it had been the same litany of bullshit all over again, _what your ma would have wanted_ and _when the winter comes_ and _I know you can take of yourself_ and _the thing is, you don’t have to_. 

Finally, Steve had snapped. They’d had a fight, one of the worst ones Steve could remember, sniping back and forth until he’d finally been worn down to his last frayed nerve, so fed up that he’d just thrown up his hands and shouted, “I can’t live with you! I can’t! I’m in love with you, you bastard, it would ruin everything!”

Then came the excruciating silence that rolled through the apartment like the rushing white wall of a shockwave; Steve felt himself rock back on his heels, stunned at the magnitude of what he’d just said. But he summoned up his last half-ounce of courage to cross his arms and raise his chin and look Bucky in the eye and wait for him to walk out of the house, never to return.

“You’re in love with me?” Bucky had said softly, his voice full of what Steve only recognized later as wonder and relief.

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it?” He tilted his chin up a little higher, as if it would shield him from whatever Bucky was going to say next.

But all he had said was, “Steve—” in a broken voice, and then he’d stepped forward, closing the distance between them in two strides, grabbing Steve’s arm with one hand and the back of his neck with the other and smashing their mouths together. There was no grace, no finesse, and it was nothing like what Steve had imagined, when he’d allowed himself to stoop as low as imagining it. But none of that mattered; it felt like Bucky had reached into the very core of him and had punched the button to start the engine of his racing, frantic heart.

Then it was teeth and tongues and hot, breathless exclamations of “fuck” and “oh,” and then Bucky’s big hands were lifting Steve up by his hips to sit him on the kitchen table. Long fingers moved around his waist to his front and stopped, trembling, on the button that held his trousers shut.

“Can I?” Bucky had asked, his voice a reed shivering in the wind and then dropping a whole octave into a groan when Steve had whispered, “Please.”

In the dim hotel room, in the big, soft bed that smells like chemical cleaners and dust, Steve spits in his palm and then wraps his fingers around his cock. He thinks about Bucky’s fingers, rough and dry and abrasive against the sensitive skin that had never felt anything but his own soft hand before. He thinks about the way it felt to be jerked off by someone whose hand was used to a different cock, who had their own way of doing it, totally different from his own. The way Bucky made a narrow circle with his thumb and forefinger and squeezed it right under his crown, the way he relaxed the bruising grip of his other hand on Steve’s hip when Steve was right on the edge and reached down into the dark recesses of Steve’s drawers and took his balls in hand, tugging lightly and then squeezing as Steve came all over his own belly with a startled gasp.

Later, when he’s cleaning himself up in the big glass-walled shower, he thinks about the way that Bucky had stepped back afterwards, his eyes huge and full of fear but trying to hide it behind a cocky grin. He’d ducked his head and smoothed a strand of loose hair back into place, muttering, “Guess I got carried away.” But Steve could see that he was shaking. He was terrified.

“Did you not hear what I said?” Steve had asked, somehow simultaneously being the one on firm footing and the one in the undignified position of trying to wipe an extraordinary amount of come off of his own shirt.

Bucky had swallowed hard, tried to look like he wasn’t frantically trying to remember. “I mean…”

“I said I was in love with you, you idiot. And that’s why I wouldn’t move in with you.”

Bucky looked, then, like a choir of angels had descended from heaven to sing, just for him. “Oh, yeah. Well, uh…”

“Cat got your tongue, Barnes?” Steve had laughed, not unkindly. It wasn’t often that he got to see Bucky wrongfooted. “You just jerked me off, I don’t see why you’re being shy.”

Bucky had grinned, then, startled and pleased and relaxing all at once. “Well, okay then. So I guess you’re gonna let me move in? ‘Cause if you thought you’d ruin it because you’re in love with me, I got news for you, pal. We’re both fucked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Metropolis, Illinois exists and yes, there is a giant Superman statue.


	6. Chapter 6

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and turns to the booth, but it’s empty.

The little pit viper of panic starts to uncurl itself at the bottom of his stomach, but he shoos it away. It’s fine, it’s okay, Bucky’s not always the first one here.

He usually is, though. He’s usually sitting half turned around in the booth, looking up over the tall wooden back and trying to catch Steve’s eye as soon as he comes in the door. He’s usually waiting with a grin and a _hey, Steve_ , and Steve feels strangely bereft at the prospect of sitting down, alone, watching the door, waiting for Bucky to come in. Maybe he should sit on Bucky’s side of the booth today so that he doesn’t have to stare at the door in painful anticipation, maybe he should—

The door opens behind him, the bells jingling their merry hello, and when he whirls around on the ball of his foot, there stands Bucky in the doorway. He looks a little startled to see Steve standing in the middle of the floor, but then a grin ignites across his face like a match laid to a trail of gunpowder.

“Hey Steve,” he says, taking a step forward. “Am I late?”

Steve can’t think of anything to say, his mind is a mist, all his thoughts aerosolized by the mere fact that Bucky’s standing _there,_ no table between them, less than an arm’s length away, close enough to reach out and touch. But then he looks up… and up and up into that irrepressible smile, and says, “Jesus, you’re taller than I remember.”

“Yeah, well, you’re shorter than I remember,” Bucky says, and his cocky joie de vivre is so palpable that Steve feels like he could get his fist around it and squeeze it like a lemon. “Why don’t you gawp at me over the table, though. I’m hungry.”

Steve shakes himself out of his reverie. Was he gawping? Embarrassingly, the answer is probably yes.

They walk to the table and slide onto their separate benches. “So, uh,” Steve starts, trying to cover up his residual embarrassment. He’s still trying to convince himself that he wasn’t gawping. “You, you were late.”

Carole Lombard comes over with the menu, but Steve waves it away. “Two cheesesteaks with peppers and two ice waters, please,” he says, and she gives him her signature wink and walks away.

“Yeah, sorry about that.”

Steve shakes his head. “No, no, it’s fine. But, um, why? I mean, maybe you don’t even know, neither one of us knows why this is happening, of course you’re not going to know why you got here after me today.”

Bucky is sitting hunched over, fingers laced together, twiddling his thumbs on the tabletop. “I mean,” he starts, and there’s a long pause where Steve waits, watching his thumbs twirl round and round, until Bucky goes on, “I kinda do, I guess.”

Steve looks up, but Bucky’s head is bent, his expression hidden as he stares down at his hands fidgeting on the tabletop. His hair gleams in the sunlight, loose curls like knots in a piece of polished walnut. “Oh?” Steve asks, a little faintly.

“Yeah…” Again Bucky trails off, a long pause stretching between them like a piece of fine gauze. Then he looks up, and Steve notices that there are dark circles under his eyes, a stale hollowness to his cheeks, and an underlying weariness that he hadn’t seen before. Or was it there before? Is this the real world pushing through into the dream again? And then Bucky says, “I was having a lot of trouble getting to sleep.”

_Ah._ “Why?” Steve asks, trying to make it sound friendly and curious, not like he’s prying. “Do you normally sleep well?” he adds.

Bucky shakes his head. The light in his eyes is muted, and a cloud passes over the face of the sun, the light coming in through the window turning a weak, pale grey. “Not really. But I make sure I sleep a little bit each night, even if I don’t feel like I really need it.”

“Why?” Steve asks. He feels like a five-year-old, a ball of insatiable curiosity repeating, “Why? Why? Why?” in a high, piping voice. He doesn’t want this to turn into an interrogation, but before he can think of something else to say, Carole Lombard appears with their cheesesteaks.

They’re delicious, and they eat in silence for a few minutes before it occurs to Steve that he no longer has an overwhelming sensory reaction to the diner’s food. He had cried, eating that first BLT, and the second one, too, overwhelmed by the flood of memory and feeling—the sun, the cicadas, long afternoons in July that seemed, when he saw them again, like drops of rainwater caught in amber, immutable moments suspended in time for eternity.

He doesn’t know whether he’s become immune to the dream’s effect on his limbic system, or whether it’s the connection he’s forging with Bucky that has dissipated, somehow, the emotional charge, like Bucky is a lightning rod that guides it to the ground. Or maybe it’s that the focus has changed; he looks at Bucky, chewing a mouthful of cheesesteak, his cheek distorted by the ball of food, and it shouldn’t be charming, but it is. It shouldn’t make his heart skip a beat when Bucky sucks his teeth to get at a bit of pepper skin that’s stuck between them, but it does.

Bucky puts his sandwich down on his plate and wipes his mouth with the napkin, and then he answers the question Steve had asked five minutes ago. “I try to sleep a little every night ‘cause… ‘cause if I didn’t sleep then you’d have to sit here all by yourself and wonder where I was.”

_Fuck._ “I… yeah.” Steve says. He swallows painfully around the half-chewed lump of steak in his throat, but at least it overpowers whatever lump of emotion seems to have balled itself up in there. “Thanks, that’s real thoughtful of you.”

Bucky shrugs.

Steve puts his own sandwich down. It’s good, but it’s not what he wants to concentrate on right now. “I… I do the same thing. For the same reason. I can’t bear the thought of you sitting here waiting for me, and me never showing up.”

Bucky looks up now and meets his eye, unblinking. “Yeah.”

“Also…” Steve looks down at his plate, at his hands now resting in his lap. “It’s kind of the highlight of my day. Night. Whatever.”

When he looks back up again, Bucky is regarding him with narrowed eyes. “But, but you have lots of friends, you have a good job, you’re famous and everybody loves you, how could this”—he gestures around the diner—"be the highlight of your day?”

Steve doesn’t know whether to laugh derisively or burst into tears. Clearly, Bucky has been doing his research. But very little written about Steve Rogers has ever ventured outside of the realm of hagiography, and research with flawed data produces misleading results. “Because you’re here,” he shrugs in the end.

A whole series of expressions passes over Bucky’s face, his eyebrows like flags marking the transit of some kind of internal communication, but he finally settles into a kind of pleased friendliness, though Steve can still plainly see the pencil-marks of wariness, half-erased.

Steve doesn’t want to put too much on him, doesn’t want Bucky to think—doesn’t want Bucky to _realize_ —how much of Steve’s happiness is contingent on him. So he says, even if it’s a little disingenuous, “I mean, you think I have a great job and I’m famous and everybody loves me and that means I should be incredibly happy with my lot in life, and maybe you’re not exactly wrong, but that’s not really the way it works.”

Bucky looks away, toward the window. The sun has come out again, shining through the window in a solid block of light, and Steve can see the dust motes dancing in the still air between them. Bucky takes a minute, not saying anything, just looking, before he turns back to Steve and, resting his cheek on the hand that’s propped on the table, he says, “Alright then, tell me how it works.”

“I mean…” Steve trails off, not really sure what he means, not sure how to put the feeling into words. “I don’t belong here.”

Bucky furrows his brow, the position of his cheek on his hand deepening the delicate wrinkles around his eyes. “What do you mean? Here in this diner?”

“No! I mean, yes. I mean. Fuck. Okay, obviously this is some weird shit and nobody knows why we’re here, so it’s not exactly like you can say we belong. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean that I don’t belong there, outside.” He gestures toward the window, though he doesn’t really mean what’s outside this particular pane of glass. In fact, he’s even not sure what’s outside—it had never before occurred to him to look.

But Bucky interrupts that train of thought and draws his attention away from the window by saying, “You mean, in the 21st century. In 2014.” He sits up straight, ducking his head and running his fingers through the short hair at the back of his neck. The look he gives Steve, when he glances back up, is surprisingly shy and full of fellow-feeling, and it doesn’t take Steve but a moment to understand.

“Oh,” he says. “You get it.”

Bucky nods, still looking at Steve from under his lashes, as if he’s trying to protect himself from something—derision? Disbelief?

“Of course you get it,” Steve says, trying to put as much hail-fellow-well-met into his voice as possible. “You don’t belong here, either.”

“I don’t belong anywhere,” Bucky says, looking back down at the table. He slips both hands into his lap and sits with his shoulders hunched, looking like a lonely boulder on a hillside, resigned to being weathered by the wind and the rain.

_You belong with me!_ Steve wants to shout, but he knows that would be the worst thing to say. Bucky belonged to Hydra for years and the Red Room before that, and the last thing that Steve wants to do is make him think that’s Steve’s angling to be the next in his long line of owners.

So he pushes his long-forgotten sandwich out of the way and reaches his hand out to the middle of the table, palm up, fingers spread, and says, “You belong to yourself.” Bucky’s eyes dart up to Steve’s face and rush all around it, looking for something, maybe that derision he seemed to be afraid of, or deceit. But he must not find whatever he’s afraid of, because he finally meets Steve’s eye and then reaches his own hand out until their fingertips are just brushing in the center of the table. The same spark passes between them again, but now it feels like a warm and comforting thing, a bright point drawing a length of golden thread that weaves their fingers together. Steve watches as Bucky grins and drums his fingertips on Steve’s palm until it tickles and Steve closes his hand with a snap, catching Bucky’s fingers in a loose fist.

“It’s difficult to wake up one day and find that everything has changed,” he says, still looking at their hands clasped together in the middle of the table. Bucky’s wiggling fingers go still and Steve can hear the sound of him swallowing, but he doesn’t look back up.

“Every time I woke up, everything was different,” Bucky says.

“You must have gotten used to it.” He says it with commiseration, but Bucky shakes his head roughly.

“No. You’ve seen the file. They wiped me every time. Every time it was the same thing all over again, but it was new for me.”

Steve shudders, clenches his jaw and wrinkles his nose against the sudden twinge of tears in his sinuses. He thinks about when he first woke up in the strange room with the out-of-date baseball game on the radio, about running into Times Square and feeling like he’d been thrust into a dozen movies all being projected one on top of another on the same screen. He imagines doing that again and again and again, but instead of worried faces and the calm, stern presence of Nick Fury, there’s only shouting and orders and cold water and the chair. And then again, and again, and again.

He squeezes his fist around Bucky’s fingers, hard enough that he can see his own knuckles blanch. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

Bucky pulls his hand back and looks, to Steve’s surprise, disgusted. “What the hell do you have to be sorry for?”

_For not catching you, for not holding on, for not searching, for giving up, for waking up to a world that venerated me rather than ripped me to pieces and sent me out to kill_ , he doesn’t say. “It’s not that I have something to be sorry for. I’m just sorry that someone I love got hurt.”

Bucky narrows his eyes right as Carole Lombard approaches the table with the check. “Someone you love?” he says, and Steve only has time to open his mouth and say, “I—”

He wakes up.

* * *

Steve calls Nat, like he’d promised to do every day, and gives her a run-down of the dream from the night before. They’ve left the long, straight back roads of corn country and are on the interstate, headed up to Chicago. They’re still driving between corn on one side and corn on the other, but the interstate sits above the fields rather than in them, their car like a boat carving its own wake through the dark Sargasso Sea.

“Last night we talked about how neither of us feel like we belong in the 21st century.”

Nat makes a sympathetic noise on the other end of the line; Steve knows she’s listening, but she’s got half her mind dedicated to something else. He could spill it all to her if he wanted to, and she would listen and remember, but she doesn’t have the bandwidth to spare for counseling right now.

“He told me that they wiped him before they put him in the ice, so every time he woke up, it was like the first time all over again. He must have been so scared and confused. It’s horrible, Nat.”

Sam’s driving again, for which Steve is unutterably grateful. He’s not doing his fair share, he knows; he’s going to owe Sam far more than a few pizzas when they get back to real life, if they ever get back to real life, if whatever they had before could be called “real life.” It probably could for Sam, but Steve’s pretty sure he hasn’t had a real life for seventy years.

He sees Sam glance at him out of the corner of his eye, but he’s already told Sam all of this, this morning over breakfast at the Pancake House. Poor Sam, he’d signed up for chasing an amnesiac ex-Hydra assassin all around the country, but he hadn’t signed up to be Steve’s shoulder to cry on. However, he bears up under it well, full of sympathy but not pity, as good a listener as a priest in the confessional but without the pontificating; _hail Samuel full of grace_ , Steve thinks in the pause, and has to stifle a sad little giggle.

“What else?” Nat prompts over the phone. Steve realizes with a start that he’s been hypnotized by the corn again.

“Um, he arrived late, which is unusual. At the beginning, I was usually there first, but after the first week or so of regular dreaming, he started to arrive before I did, and he was always sitting on his side of the booth when I got there.” Nat makes an equivocal thinking noise on the other end of the line, but Steve continues, “He said it was because he’d had trouble falling asleep, and he doesn’t sleep very much, but he makes sure to sleep at least a little each night because he doesn’t want me to have to sit in the diner alone.”

“That’s… that’s a nice sentiment,” she says, and Steve can hear the unspoken _but_ zooming down the invisible phone line toward him.

“But what,” he says flatly.

She heaves a sigh. “I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” he says automatically. And then, “I mean, besides the obvious fact that it’s weird.”

“Look. There’s chatter on the line about the Winter Soldier, but it’s only speculative. Everyone knows he’s in the wind, but no one knows where he is. At least, none of my sources know where he is, which I’m pretty sure means that Hydra doesn’t have him.”

“Of course they don’t! How could they have him? He sent me that message and he’s been showing up every night in the diner, and—”

“Steve—”

“I know what you’re going to say. I know I shouldn’t… trust me. I know.” That could mean any one of half a dozen things and he knows that she knows that.

“All I’m saying is we don’t know why this is happening. He might not be under Hydra’s control anymore, but that doesn’t mean he’s not under somebody else’s thumb. Dreamsharing is weird, Steve, it’s very weird, and we can’t rule out that it’s being induced.”

Sam must be able to hear Nat’s end of the conversation in the quiet car, because he pipes up, “What if we took this to someone who’s a little more used to dealing with weird shit, like Strange?”

“No!” Steve says. “I don’t… I don’t want to take it to Strange. Or anybody else. Not even Tony, he’ll want me to come to New York and do all kinds of brain scans. I don’t want somebody poking around inside my head.”

“Bucky’s poking around inside your head, you know,” Sam says. He says it softly, but Steve can feel himself bristle, anyway. He tries to tamp it down, but he knows his defensiveness is sticking out all over him like a fistful of porcupine quills.

“That’s different,” he says, keeping his voice even. “That’s… that’s Bucky.”

“I think what you mean is that you don’t want someone to break the connection.” Natasha says it matter-of-factly, but Steve can tell that she’s trying to hold his feelings nestled in the palm of her hand, just like Sam does, afraid that he might shatter into a thousand pieces if handled too roughly.

There’s a long, long pause while he looks out the window. Finally, he says, “Yeah.”

“Steve, I’m just…” He’s never heard her this hesitant before, and it gives him pause. Normally, Nat is a no-nonsense, tough-love kind of friend, and he values that about her. He wonders how much fragility he’s really projecting, here, if she feels like she has to keep him in cotton wool and parcel out her words carefully in order to spare his feelings. “What if someone is using him? To entrap you?” she finally says.

“I’d know. I know I’d know. I know him, and every time I see him, I know him more, he gets back more of himself, he remembers more.” Steve doesn’t have to think about it; it’s a certainty in his gut like the mast of a tall ship, one solid beam sunk all the way down to his hull.

“There are some organizations out there with some really sophisticated—”

“No,” he interrupts. “No. Look, I’ll be careful. But you can’t…” _You can’t take this away from me_ , he wants to say. He doesn’t say it out loud, but she knows. Of course she does.

There’s a small, nigh-imperceptible sigh on the other end of the line. “Do you have a plan?”

“A plan for what?”

“Are you just going to keep dreaming you’re having lunch together in the same diner forever?”

Steve heaves his own sigh, a loud, gusty one. “No, I… I hope not. I mean.” She waits for him to finish while he tries, for the umpteenth time, to push his seat back so that he can stretch his legs out further in the footwell. Maybe he’s taking his frustration out on the poor adjustment lever, but this car is too small for his big, onerous frame, and he’s not sure that he can stand the itchy, restless feeling buzzing in his knees until the next rest area. “All I want to do is show him that he doesn’t have to run. He can trust me. That I want to… I want to be with him.”

“Steve.”

“In any sense of the word ‘with.’” He arches his back, stretches his arm not holding the phone over his head and behind the seat back until his shoulder joint cracks. The restless feeling just grows. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I just… I just want him to know that all I want is for him to be healthy and safe. And that I’d really love to see him, but that’s… that’s secondary.”

She’s silent for a long minute, and when she speaks again, there’s a note of resignation in her voice. Not defeat; never defeat, she’s stronger than he is in every way and they both know it. “Just keep me posted, okay?”

“I will,” he says, gratitude overwhelming the irritable restlessness for a moment. “Of course I will.”

* * *

That night, Steve orders two Chicago-specialty Italian beef sandwiches, hot, hoping that maybe Bucky will take the bait and ask him if he’s in the Windy City, maybe offer in return some tidbit about his own life, such as it is. But he’s the same as ever, cheerful, witty, acting as if the last conversation had never happened, as if Steve hadn’t let the L-word slip the leash of his tongue.

He knows it’s a façade, though; he can see that there’s something a little more careful behind Bucky’s cheerful demeanor. He’s watching Steve for something, for another slip of the tongue, for a confession, for a clue? To the puzzle of why this is happening? Steve can’t begin to puzzle it out, himself, and he’s starting to feel tired, these days, even while he’s asleep. It’s in his bones, it’s in his soul, a heaviness that feels a little like succumbing to the ice again. His deepest, most ardent desire is to find Bucky and take him home and curl up with him under the big, blue-and-white quilt on his bed and fall into a dreamless sleep that lasts forever, or at least until the sun rises again.

So instead of waiting for Bucky to rise to his vague, regional-cuisine bait, he just cuts to the chase. “So, you said yesterday that you were late because you’d had trouble sleeping, and I asked you why, but we got sidetracked and you never answered the question.”

Bucky’s eyes widen, almost imperceptibly, and Steve would never have caught it if he hadn’t been looking straight at him. Then Bucky looks down, looks around the diner, the same nervous _flick flick flick_ that Steve hasn’t seen in a while. He doesn’t meet Steve’s eye again, even when Steve clears his throat softly.

So he says, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“I just don’t know if it’ll make everything worse”

Steve feels a jolt of fear slash through him, and a little voice that skitters across his consciousness like a beetle; _what if Nat’s right, what if somebody is using Bucky to get to me?_

He knows it’s not true. He does. He’d stake his life on it, which, he supposes, is exactly what he’s doing. But he also knows, instinctively, that he has to walk a thin line, pretending like the thought had never crossed his mind in the first place, because if Bucky picks up on it...

“I’m here for you,” he says, meaning here in the diner, here in North America, here in his heart where he keeps the door cracked open for Bucky, waiting, hoping that one day he’ll decide to come inside. He pulls his hand out of his lap and goes to stretch it across the table, but Bucky shakes his head minutely, glancing to the left where Steve finally notices that Carole Lombard is standing with their plates.

The giardiniera is hotter than he thought it was going to be, and he coughs a few times after his first bite, his eyes watering, his face red. Bucky grins at him over the end of his own sandwich, though he doesn’t look like he’s eating anything spicier than peanut butter and jelly, himself.

“How in the world,” Steve complains, drinking half of his water in one gulp, “are you not dying over there? I’m dying over here.”

Bucky’s cheeky grin turns back into something flat and one-dimensional and he looks down at his sandwich while Steve’s stomach sinks into the bottom of his shoes. He opens his mouth to smooth it over, about to say something about how his tastes are still stuck in the 1940s, when Bucky says, “I have a high… pain tolerance.” He grins again, but it’s a pale imitation of his usual brilliant smile; it’s a smile with a shroud over it.

Steve feels his heart clench, a fist spasming around nothing. _I’m sorry_ is right on the tip of his tongue, but he remembers how Bucky had reacted to his reflexive apologies the last time. So he nods and takes another bite of his sandwich, considering carefully what to say next.

“That must be… a blessing and a curse.”

Bucky’s eyes flick up to his, calculating, like he’s wondering if Steve is making fun of him. But then he relaxes a little, nodding minutely, and the side of his mouth quirks up a quarter of an inch. If it’s not exactly a smile, at least it’s genuine, so Steve accepts it gratefully.

They in eat in silence for a few more minutes, and when Steve is almost done with his sandwich, he prompts, “So you had trouble sleeping?”

He expects Bucky to look startled again, like he had before, but instead he looks annoyed, as if he’d taken for granted that Steve had forgotten about it, or that they’d dropped the subject by mutual, silent accord. _I know you don’t know me very well,_ Steve thinks to himself, watching while Bucky sets the end of his sandwich on the plate and presses his lips together until they’re just a thin, pale slash in his face, _but you’ll soon figure out I don’t know when to quit._

“Fine,” Bucky says, folding his arms tightly over his chest, his hands wrapped around his own ribs. “I told you I don’t know if it’ll make everything worse, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Steve keeps his mouth shut by force of will. He limits himself to nodding, trying to mold his face into something neutral and receptive. Instead, a piece of pepper goes down the wrong way and he coughs and chokes and gulps down the rest of his water, spilling some down his chin and getting the front of his shirt wet. It works, though; the more ridiculous Steve looks, the more it puts Bucky at ease, apparently. His shoulders visibly drop, the acute angle where his collarbones meet at the base of his throat flattening out under the open collar of his ragged shirt.

He looks toward the window while Steve is wiping his streaming eyes on the napkin, and says, “I got… hurt. Pretty bad, and it made it difficult to fall asleep. That’s why I was late.” He doesn’t look at Steve, just keeps staring out the window, his arms still wrapped tightly around himself. Steve can see that his fingers are digging into his ribs, his knuckles white from the strain, although to look at his face he seems unperturbed, almost bored.

Steve very carefully bites back everything he wants to say, every knee-jerk reaction and panicked outburst. He counts to ten in his head, slowly, and then takes a deep breath and says, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

Bucky looks back at him now with narrowed eyes, then turns fully around in his seat to face Steve and gives him a long, appraising look from under the shadows of his dark lashes. “You’re not freaking out,” he says.

Steve almost laughs, nascent hysteria bubbling up through his throat. But he manages to push it all into the bottle of his chest and shove the cork in so that it can’t escape; his face, he keeps open, thoughtful, receptive, serene. But he still can’t lie to Bucky. “No, but that doesn’t mean I won’t, later. I just… I don’t want to scare you.”

It’s Bucky’s turn to laugh, then, a short, sharp, unhappy bark. “You can’t scare me, pal,” he says.

Steve just shrugs. Whatever that means, he’ll think about it later, like everything else—bottle, cork, and on to more important things. “Look, all I feel like I need to know is if you’re okay right now. If you need anything. If I can help you. I just want to know that you’re safe.”

“Yes, no, no, and yes,” Bucky says shortly. And then—as Steve feels his face wilt like a night-blooming flower at the break of day—his eyes soften a little and he says, “I’m fine now. It was… I got a, a burn.” He’s clearly trying to placate Steve without actually going into detail. Steve racks his brains, trying to remember anything he’d seen this morning on the news in the motel dining room, if there’d been a mysterious explosion anywhere, a fire, a gas leak, but he remembers nothing.

“And burns hurt a lot, you know,” Bucky continues, “even if they’re not that serious, which is why I had trouble getting to sleep. But… you’ve read my file. I’ve got the serum, same as you. So, so I’m fine, now.”

Steve’s sandwich is getting soggy in his hand and half the filling has plopped out the back of the baguette and onto his plate, but he doesn’t want to put it down. He’s not exactly sure what signals the end of the dream, but clearly, they’re given enough time to finish their food, more or less. Maybe… maybe if he just doesn’t finish, then the dream will never end. He feels the fist clench again in his chest, but it’s a choking feeling this time, a longing to hold and heal and protect that fills up the chambers of his heart like thick, sticky honey.

“What happened? Did you get ambushed at a base?” he says, without even thinking about it, and Bucky immediately goes rigid, the shutters falling down behind his eyes with a crash. He looks like he’s been carved from stone, his face a pale expanse of cold marble, and he’s not even looking at Steve, but staring a hole through the plush red vinyl behind his head.

Steve drops his sandwich on his plate and reaches his hand out, desperately, but Bucky doesn’t move to take it. He just says, his voice flat and uninflected, “How did you know about that?”

Internally, Steve is screaming at himself, pulling his hair out in great big tufts and wailing. But externally he just clears his throat and says, calmly, “Buck, I’ve been trying to find you. Since a week after the helicarriers fell, I’ve been looking for you. I know about the bases, I know what you’ve been doing.” And then when the silence around them grows to something deafening that Steve can feel pressing into his ears, he says, “Bucky, look at me. It’s okay, I just want to help you.”

A muscle jumps in Bucky’s jaw, and then the blank marble façade turns to dust, his face crumpling into something even more frightening and painful. He looks at Steve and Steve can see anger and despair in his eyes, and a deeper wound whose origin he doesn’t know. Bucky grinds his teeth together, audible across the table that now seems miles wide, and says in a voice that’s thick with anguish, “You have to stop looking for me, Steve. Please.” Then he darts his left hand into the crook of his right arm and pinches the flesh viciously, so hard that Steve can see the bruise immediately stand out livid against his pale skin.

He disappears.

Steve is left sitting alone in front of the sloppy remains of his own sandwich, his hand extended across the table in friendship and comfort to no one. Carole Lombard appears beside the table and sets the check down with a smile.

He wakes up.


	7. Chapter 7

When he wakes up, he can hear that Sam is already in the shower on the other side of the thin bathroom wall. One night in a nice hotel had been enough, and now they’re back in flat-pack roadside motels—or what would be flat-pack if flat-pack had been invented when the motels were originally furnished. Dusty curtains, balsawood night tables, particleboard partitions, and bedframes that creak every time Steve thinks about rolling over.

It’s not that he’s got anything against nice hotels, but Sam swears up and down that he doesn’t want to spend extra money on what is, in effect, eight hours of unconsciousness. Even though their expenses are barely eating into the interest accrued on the frankly staggering amount of money that Steve’s seventy-year-old pension had turned into while he was in the ice, Sam still seems reluctant to spend anything but the bare minimum, and Steve doesn’t want to make him uncomfortable by insisting. Yesterday evening, approaching Chicago, Steve had said, “You want your own room again tonight?” and Sam had said, “Nah,” and that had been the end of the discussion.

He rolls over, followed by a chorus of squeaks and squeals, and faces away from the bathroom door, just to give himself an extra five seconds to compose his face if Sam comes out before he’s ready. He’ll do his silent crying when it’s his turn in the shower, but he can’t help thinking about the dream, going back to the last moment when Bucky had woken himself up, the anger and despair on his face, the way the petal-soft skin of his inner arm had turned a furious purple-red when he’d pinched it. Steve feels a pinch of sympathetic pain in his own inner arm and rubs it hard under the blanket with his other hand.

He’d bottled up his feelings last night, not wanting to scare Bucky inside the dream, but now it feels like they’ve fermented in his chest, turning into something volatile, one imprudent shake away from exploding. He moves his hand from his inner arm to his chest; it hurts, too, the way his angina used to hurt before he got the serum, a pain that was somehow dull and sharp at the same time.

The water stops running in the bathroom.

With a sigh, he pushes himself up in bed and scrubs his hands all over his face, trying to wake his skin up a little. Sam comes out of the bathroom with one towel around his waist and another around his head and says, “Oh, you’re up.” He peers at Steve and then says, “Bad night?”

This is the other reason why Steve doesn’t insist on fancy hotels and separate rooms. It’s nice to share space with another person, nice to have a friend and keep them close. It’s not that Steve wants to pile into the bed with Sam like he’d do with Nat, but the opportunity of being perceived when he’s at his most vulnerable, still half-asleep, before the walls go up automatically, is something that he doesn’t take for granted. When he wakes up, he’s like glue, fresh from the tube, goopy and malleable. But as the morning progresses—get up, take a shower, put on real clothes, eat breakfast—he hardens into whatever shape the day has taken. On a normal day, it’s very, very difficult to break the mold before sleep breaks it for him again.

“Yeah,” he says, and then the words spill out of him, still liquid. “He told me he’d gotten hurt”—Sam looks up sharply from where he’s sorting things in his duffel bag—“but that he’s okay, now. And I asked if he’d been hurt in a raid on a base.”

“Oh shit,” Sam whispers.

“Yeah. He got angry. Or maybe not angry, exactly. But… anyway, he told me I had to stop looking for him.” He rubs his hands all over his face again; his skin feels puffy, and his palms, although he hasn’t thrown the shield in more than a month, are rough, and sting like a dry loofah.

“What did you say?” Sam asks. He turns his back and drops his towel, pulling his underwear on. Steve thinks his modesty is funny; he certainly has no modesty himself. So many people have seen his dick in the SHIELD locker rooms that it’s a wonder a surreptitiously-captured picture of it has never been leaked to the press.

“I said that I just wanted to help him and make sure he was okay.”

Sam pulls the towel off his head and drops it on the floor, then sits heavily on the bed across from Steve, mirroring his elbows-on-knees position. “Did he say anything else besides ‘Stop looking for me?’”

“He said ‘please.’” A little laugh burbles out of his chest like a curl of acrid smoke. Maybe it’s not a volatile explosive in his chest, maybe it’s a genie, ready to give Steve three wishes—with strings attached. Sam is silent, so after a minute Steve stands up and stretches, cracking half his vertebrae in one go. “Well, I’m going to hop in the shower and then we can head on into the city.”

“Steve…”

He walks around to the dresser and roots through in his own duffel with his back to Sam in order to buy himself time. “What?” he says after a minute.

“It’s really Barnes, isn’t it?” Sam asks, but it’s not a question, it’s point one on a numbered list. Steve closes his eyes and counts to ten; it’s not that he’s mad, or even irritated. It’s just that he wants to get in the goddamn shower and out of this conversation as soon as possible. His skin feels like it’s grown too tight during the night, all his innards squeezed uncomfortably like sausage filling, generating too much heat. He’s a chorizo about to split on a hot grill; he feels sweat bead at his hairline, even though the room is at an objectively comfortable temperature.

“Yeah, of course. I thought we’d already established this.” Where is his shaving kit? He put it right on the top when he was packing this morning, and now it’s fucking—

“And he asked you to stop looking for him?” Sam continues.

“Yeah?” He can’t stop the irritation from showing in his voice, now.

“Then I think we should go home,” Sam says, a no-nonsense voice that brooks no argument.

Steve whirls around to face him. “No.”

Sam holds up two placating hands. He should look awfully vulnerable, sitting barefoot on the bed in nothing but his underwear, but it’s Steve that feels intimidated. “I know it’ll be hard,” Sam starts.

“No. No!” He whirls across the floor and into the bathroom, slamming the door, which shivers in its flimsy frame like an autumn leaf. He spins the wheel of the rusty faucet until steaming hot water comes pouring out, and then pulls the stopper for the shower.

The water is scalding. It burns his skin when he steps underneath, and he reluctantly reaches down to add a little cold. He doesn’t actually want to hurt himself, but he feels like a wild animal trapped in a cage, reduced to picking its own skin raw and bloody out of frustration, boredom, and sheer, helpless rage.

When he comes back out, a long time later, Sam has his bag packed and his clothes on and is lying back against the headboard of his bed, scrolling through his phone. He glances up at Steve, but doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Steve says immediately. He’s not just saying it; he really is sorry. He hates fighting with the people he loves, and he doesn’t hold grudges. It’s not in his nature to sink his teeth into his anger and never let it go.

“Sorry for what?” Sam asks.

“For yelling. For not listening.” He fishes his underwear out of his duffel and drops his towel to slip it on. His shaving kit he finds underneath his shorts—so much for a smooth face, today.

“You don’t have to listen to me, Steve,” Sam says with a sigh. “I’m not your boss. But don’t yell at me.”

“I know, and again, I’m sorry. And you’re right, we should go home.”

He’d thought about it in the shower, he’d felt the gut-punch of reflexive fear and let it sit in his belly and wrap its fingers around his racing heart. And then he’d let it move through him and away, although it didn’t dissipate completely. And it probably never will, at least not until he can curl up with Bucky under the big, blue-and-white quilt on his bed and fall into a dreamless sleep that lasts forever, or at least until the sun rises again.

But he’s a tactician at heart, and after the first moment’s reflexive _No_ , he realizes that it’s the best strategy, to go home and wait for Bucky to find him there.

“And where’s home, Steve?” Sam says after a long moment.

“I…” Steve stops, his shorts hanging unfastened around his hips, a t-shirt in his hand. “Good question.”

He finishes dressing in silence; Sam goes back to scrolling through his phone. It’s when they’re at the Pancake House next door to the motel, tucking into two plates of waffles, that Sam clears his throat and says, “Look. I’ve… I’ve been thinking about leaving DC.”

“Oh?” Steve is surprised, but, after a moment’s reflection, maybe not so much. “Why?”

“Well, a lot of reasons. While we were in New York, Tony put out some feelers about me maybe joining the team, or at least participating a little more in the Avengers Initiative. I would still want to keep my day job at the VA, but I’m pretty sure I can get a transfer to one of the locations in Manhattan, especially if Tony knows a guy.”

Steve is nodding, saying “yeah, yeah,” as Sam talks. It makes perfect sense. He’s a wonderful asset to the Avengers, a great teammate, cohesive and level-headed. Steve knows, even though he’s only known him for a month and a half, that there’s no one he’d rather fight beside—except for Nat.

“And then,” Sam goes on, “my mom lives in Harlem, and she’d be over the moon if I decided to move back home. Plus I’m not really sure how I feel about sticking around DC anymore, not after what happened with… with everything.”

“Yeah, I know exactly what you mean,” Steve says. He hasn’t given it one iota of thought, but he knows he feels the same way. DC was never home, his apartment—furnished by some SHIELD intern who was given a catalogue of knock-off “vintage” home goods and an unlimited budget—was never his, he didn’t make friends there, or even see anyone besides coworkers. Sam was the only person he’d ever worked up the courage to talk to outside of his capacity as Captain America, and here Sam is, telling him he’s thinking about moving to New York.

“So what I’m saying, Steve, is that now that SHIELD’s gone tits up, you don’t really have any reason to stay in DC, either, do you?” Steve shakes his head, his mouth full of waffles. “So why don’t you come to New York, too? For you, it’ll just be going back home.”

Sam’s got his serious listening face on, but Steve doesn’t know why Sam would think that he would object. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and when Sam narrows his eyes, “No, really, there’s nothing to keep me in DC, and New York _is_ home. It’ll be nice,” he says wistfully, “to be back in Brooklyn again.”

“Well, I was gonna ask if you wanted to find an apartment together,” Sam says, narrowing his eyes even further, “but I’m not living in Brooklyn.”

“Not even if I bought a place and didn’t charge you rent?” Steve asks, shoveling the last forkful of waffle into his mouth.

Sam frowns, and Steve almost laughs—he remembers Nat saying, _Does he have that cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows?_ “Wellllll,” Sam says, drawing the word out. “I want my own room.”

“Your own room, got it.”

“With an ensuite.”

“Ensuite, check.” Steve makes a little check mark motion with his free hand.

“And there better be a nice kitchen.”

“Nice kitchen, I’ll put it on the list. Anything else?”

Sam grins at him over the table, “I think we can hash the rest of the details out later.” He takes a last bite of his waffle and drains the dregs of his coffee. “For now, we’ve got to drive all the way back to the East Coast, and I, for one, am sick and fucking tired of that goddamn car.”

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and turns to the booth, but it’s empty.

A little jolt of panic, but then he tells himself, _It’s okay, it’s fine, this is what happened last time, any minute now, Bucky’s going to walk through that door._

He dawdles in the center of the floor, scuffing the toe of his anonymous brown leather shoe over the worn linoleum. He looks around, for the first time since the first time he’d found himself here. There are still other people in the diner, their forms still indistinct. They’re pixelated, but their pixels are soft and worn round the edges, well-used, lending-library pixels. He remembers that he’s wearing glasses and pushes them up his nose, but nothing resolves into a clearer form. If anything, his eyes seem to slip faster over the shapes of them, as if they lack the visual traction that makes sight work, and their conversation, when he tries to concentrate, is a murmur that hums in his ear at some register that makes it almost impossible to listen to consciously.

He walks slowly over to the booth he shares every night with Bucky and hesitates, but eventually decides to sit down on his own side. He could sit on Bucky’s side, save himself the trouble of staring at the door like an unblinking sphinx, but he doesn’t want Bucky to think he’s imposing, that Steve feels like he has a right to Bucky’s proximity as well as his dreams.

He’s not exactly excited to tell Bucky the news, that he and Sam have decided to give up the search and go home. He knows it’s what Bucky wants him to do, but he still feels that instinctive _No_ , like a bulldog being told to let go of a rope. But he’s eager to tell Bucky that they’ve decided to move to New York, to Brooklyn, and that as soon as it was Sam’s turn to drive yesterday, Steve had pulled out his phone and scrolled through real estate listings all the way across Indiana.

He doesn’t want to ask, _What kind of house would you like to live in?_ but he thinks it. A little subtlety, perhaps, applied with the lever of disingenuity, might be enough to pry some secret preference out of Bucky—a backyard, a tree-lined street, close to the park? Or maybe an apartment with a doorman in a new building near the subway would be better? Would he object to a cat?

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Carole Lombard round the end of the counter and walk over with the menu in her hand, and he glances at the door. But the door remains closed, the bells unrung.

His heart sinks like a drop of molten lead into the cold, watery recesses of his gut. Bucky’s not coming. Carole Lombard moves to lay the menu down in front of him, but he shakes his head and waves it away. “Just, uh, a cup of coffee. And”—he has no appetite; he casts about for something he can choke down—"and a brownie.” Carole Lombard smiles and whisks herself away with the menu.

He’s not hungry; in fact, the thought of putting anything in his stomach right now makes him feel nauseous. But he doesn’t know if eating is a condition of the dream. Maybe if he refuses to eat, he wakes up. Maybe the dream is self-perpetuating, and the only thing that keeps him coming back night after night is the food that he eats, like Persephone and the pomegranate seeds. But that would make this the underworld, and Bucky would be Hades. Or perhaps that’s the part being played by Steve, drawing Bucky here night after night, feeding him dream food, coaxing him bit by bit to give up his freedom, such as it is, and come home.

A small home, the smallest brownstone he can find, maybe. A backyard. A big oak tree pushing up the sidewalk in front of the house. There’ll be a good kitchen, as per Sam’s request, and three bedrooms. Bucky can have his own, if he wants. And a dog would be nice, but Steve doesn’t exactly have a regular schedule. A cat would definitely be better, it could sleep at night at the foot of the bed, on top of the big blue-and-white quilt.

He realizes dispassionately that he’s crying. _Oh, well._

He lets himself wallow in formless sorrow until Carole Lombard appears at the tableside with his cup of coffee and his brownie. It’s big, four inches on a side and an inch thick, cut from the center of the pan. The fudgy inside is a dark, rich, cocoa black, and the top is shiny and crackles when he presses on it gently with his thumb. It smells like toasted butter and real vanilla and the nutty, roasted overtones of quality dark chocolate melting in a bain marie. His stomach growls.

He wipes his eyes and his nose on the napkin and picks up his fork. The nausea is gone; all he feels now is a craving for the kind of high-fat, bittersweet burst of carbohydrates that only a brownie can satisfy. The flavor in the first bite washes across his tongue like a tidal wave of cocoa and sugar, and it’s so good he moans. He feels a reflexive embarrassment, but tamps it down—who’s here to hear him? He’s alone at the table, alone inside the small world of the diner, and on the other side of the veil, he’s alone in his creaky motel bed, probably curled into a ball, his big body trying to make itself smaller, even in sleep.

The brownie doesn’t exactly lose its taste, but all of a sudden, the pleasure is no longer there. He puts his fork back down.

Bucky has to sleep sometime, he thinks. He knows how long he himself can go without sleep, and the answer isn’t very heartening, but after more than forty-eight hours without a little rest, he starts to make mistakes. If he’s on a mission, the shield doesn’t fly as true; if he’s off-duty, he catches himself staring at the wall, losing small bits of time like a Yule tree shedding needles. Bucky could go for days, possibly even weeks without sleep, but it’s going to compromise his effectiveness, and Steve is sure that he knows this.

But what if he’s not asleep because he’s been captured? What if some base had got word that someone was going around, systematically taking out leftover Hydra strongholds, and they’d been ready? What if they’d used the words? What if they have him in a chair?

_Oh god. Oh god. Oh fuck_. He can feel the panic attack coming on, the racing of his heart driving his pulse thundering through his ears, he can’t breathe, it feels like there’s a hand around his throat, his own hand is at his throat tearing open the collar of his shirt. Distantly he feels a button pop; it pings off somewhere to the right of the table and disappears.

_Breathe, Steve. Breathe_. He closes his eyes on the brownie and the coffee, still miraculously steaming, and the nebulous rest of the diner and the dark, bruised-underbelly light trickling in weakly through the window. He thinks about Nat, her small, cool hand pressed to the back of his neck, her other hand slipped through the torn-open neck of his suit and pressing into his chest, right above his heart. _Breathe for me, Steve,_ she says in his mind. _Follow me._ And then she breathes in slowly through her nose, holds the breath for a beat, and lets it go just as slowly between her pursed lips.

All of a sudden, he’s overwhelmed by the desire to go home.

_And where’s home, Steve?_

It’s a tiny little tenement apartment with one bed where he curls up with his mother to sleep at night. She smells like the cheap soap they wash their clothes with and something harsh and hospitalish that always clings to her skin for hours after she works a shift. But she also smells like something more subtle, like milk, or perhaps the memory of milk and the unrepentant comfort of lying half-asleep with his tiny face pressed to her soft breast.

It’s the same tenement and the same bed, but many years later, where he curls up with Bucky and clings to his rough work shirt as he shivers through the paroxysms of grief. Many months after that, they lay down on the same bed, but there are no shirts between them, this time, and Bucky presses his trembling red mouth up against the underside of Steve’s jaw and lets Steve touch him in the secret place between his legs that makes him shudder and fall to pieces with a soft _whoosh_ like a collapsing house of cards.

Home is a far country just barely visible on the other side of an unbridgeable chasm. Home is a dream within a dream.

Carole Lombard appears beside the table and sets the check down with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

Sam is sitting on the side of his bed saying, “Oh, thank fuck, you’re awake. Jesus christ.” Steve watches him scrub at his face with his hands, blinking his own bleary eyes and feeling the residue of sleep on his skin like condensation beaded on a window, turning it opaque.

“You were making these noises,” Sam says, running his hands across his short hair, now, “and breathing like you were drowning in plain air, and I tried to wake you up, but I couldn’t. And I was afraid to try harder, I didn’t… I didn’t know what might happen.” He flops backward across Steve’s shins under the pilled motel blanket and grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Weird shit is happening to you every night while you sleep, and I didn’t realize how weird it was until right now.”

“I was having a panic attack,” Steve mumbles. He still feels like he’s got one foot in the dream world, like having one foot in the sea, sinking further into the sand each time the waves run back out. “In the dream,” he adds belatedly.

Sam sits back up again. His shirt is all twisted around his torso, and his eyes are bleary, too. “What happened?”

“He wasn’t there.” Steve looks away from Sam, glances at the ceiling where there’s a badly painted-over water stain. “And I was worried that maybe he hadn’t slept because he’d gotten caught, maybe they figured out what he was doing and they ambushed him at a base and they got him and—”

“Stop,” Sam says, wonderfully quiet and authoritative. He reaches over and takes Steve’s hand where it’s lying on the covers. The skin of his palm is warm and soft, his long fingers wrapping around the delicate metatarsals on the back of Steve’s hand and squeezing hard. It’s enough to break him out of the cycle of panic—can’t breathe—more panic and he takes a deep breath and holds it, squeezing Sam’s hand in return.

“You don’t know why he wasn’t there, and there’s nothing we can do in the next thirty minutes that will make a difference.” Sam reaches around with his other hand and squeezes Steve’s between them. “I want you to focus on getting out of bed and taking a shower. Then we’ll check out, call Nat, and get something to eat. And at any rate, we’ll be back in DC tonight, and it’ll be easier to regroup there.”

“Nat, yeah,” Steve says, and feels a little bit better. The panic isn’t gone, it’s still hiding behind his eyes and he can feel its tail coiled loosely, threateningly, round the base of his throat, but he can get up. He can take a shower. And then Nat will know what to do.

They check out of the motel and Sam pulls through the McDonald’s next door and gets them a whole bag of breakfast sandwiches to eat on the go. Steve didn’t even have to say that he wasn’t capable of having a proper sit-down breakfast; Sam just knew. Between him and Nat, Steve sometimes feels like an overgrown child, incapable of reigning in his volatile emotions or having one iota of forethought or good sense. He resolves to find Sam the best kitchen in Brooklyn, even if he has to remodel it himself.

He sends a message to the New York phone number at gmail dot com as they’re sitting in the drive-through line, and then the waiting begins. Fifteen minutes after they pull onto the interstate, he begs Sam to let him drive—even though Sam is doubtful—because he needs the distraction. If he has to sit in the passenger seat and look out the window at the most nondescript parts of Ohio, he’s going to pull all his hair out, bite his nails to the quick, or pick at the hem of his shirt until it falls apart in his lap.

Nat doesn’t call until an hour and a half later, when they’re about to cross the border into Pennsylvania. Sam picks up the phone where it’s buzzing in the center console while Steve thanks his lucky stars that there’s a rest area coming up in half a mile.

“Oh hi, Giovanni,” Sam says with a laugh. Steve can see him glance over out of the corner of his eye. “Steve’s driving. Look, there was a problem last night, Barnes didn’t show up in the diner, and Steve’s really worried.” He pauses for a second while Steve puts on his blinker and gets ready to turn off the interstate. “Yeah, give him a second to park, we’re at a rest area right on the border with Pennsylvania.” There’s another pause, and Sam says, indignant, “Wait, are you tracking us?”

Steve almost laughs, of _course_ she’s tracking them, but he pulls into the closest parking space and holds his hand out for the phone. Sam passes it over with one last volley—”well, I don’t care how cute you are”—and then mouths, looking flustered, _I’m going to pee_ , and slides out the passenger-side door.

“Tell me everything,” Nat says as soon as he puts the phone to his ear.

When he’s done, she’s silent on the other side of the line, but he can hear the faint _click-clack_ of her fingers on a keyboard. “You should stop at Primanti Brothers,” she says out of the blue.

“What?” Steve actually pulls the phone away from his ear in confusion to make sure it’s still Nat he’s talking to.

“Primanti Brothers. It’s a Pittsburgh institution. Good sandwiches, could give you some ideas for diner food. You could introduce Barnes to the concept of putting fries on sandwiches.”

“That’s just a chip butty,” Steve says, still confused, but ready to play along. “He’s had them before. They had them in England during the war.”

Nat snorts, and then Steve puts two and two together. “Wait, do you think he’s okay? You think he’s going to come back?” To the dream, he means, but the dream is the spun-gold fishing line with which he hopes to draw Bucky back into real life.

“I don’t deal in certainties, Steve, you know that,” she says. “But there’s been no talk on the line. No little flies have plucked the filaments of my web, and Hydra pipsqueaks like to talk big. If they had him, I think I’d know.”

“My little spider,” Steve says, relief rushing through him like a spring tide, pushing up through his marshes and river mouths and flooding his banks with clean, salty water.

“That’s me,” she says in his ear.

He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the headrest with a soft thump. It’s not a guarantee, Nat doesn’t deal in certainties and there are other things that could have happened to Bucky, but his big fears—Hydra, the words, the chair— have been put to rest.

“I should probably tell you,” he says after a long, silent moment of listening to her click-clacking away on the other end of the line, “if you haven’t already guessed, that we’re heading back to DC.”

“Mm hmm,” she says.

“And then I’m going to New York. I’m moving to New York, I mean.”

Nothing changes in the quality of the sound, but he can tell that she’s perked up, as if half of her attention had wandered to something else and has now swung back around like the beam of a searchlight to focus on him and his big, seat-of-the-pants plans.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, you know DC was never really my home. And there’s no reason for me to stay there, now that SHIELD’s in pieces. And you’re not there,” he adds. He doesn’t add that he’s like a boat whose anchor had come unstuck from the seabed; without her to ground him, he yaws all over the ocean.

“What about Sam?”

“Sam’s not you,” he says, but he knows what she means. “He’s coming too, actually. He feels the same as me, and he thinks he can get a transfer to the VA office in Manhattan. Plus, Tony’s been trying to get him to slap the big red A on his suit.”

She laughs, a low chuckle that tickles his ear like a trickle of warm water. “Clint’ll be happy. He won’t be the only birdie on the team, anymore.”

“Nope. So, we’re going back to DC right now, and then I’ll pack up what little I have and then go to New York. I’ll stay in the Tower until I find a place to buy. Somewhere in Brooklyn, probably.”

“Somewhere in Brooklyn,” she echoes. “Sounds like you’re going home.”

“I sure hope so, Nat.” He feels choked up all over again. “It’s… it’s been a long, long time.”


	8. Chapter 8

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and turns to the booth, and his heart leaps into his throat when he sees the familiar crown of Bucky’s dark head over the tall wooden back. He rushes over to the table and, hardly knowing what he’s doing, he lays his hand on Bucky’s shoulder.

If Bucky startles, it’s well-hidden; all Steve sees is a hesitant friendliness, his eyes wide and waiting, his smile small, but sincere. “You’re here,” Steve breathes, and gives the shoulder under his hand an unconscious squeeze. It feels soft and warm and hard and cold all at once, and the conflicting sensations are what finally shake Steve out of his reverie.

He pulls his hand off of Bucky’s shoulder fast and opens his mouth, about to apologize, when Bucky says, “Yeah, I’m here.” And then he ducks his head, looking down at the table and hiding his face like a drooping poppy from Steve’s view. Steve can see the reproach written across the stiff line of his shoulders and the sweet nape of his neck, but he doesn’t know who Bucky is reproaching—Steve or himself?

So he slides into the other side of the booth, scooting down until they’re opposite each other. Bucky is examining the palm of his left hand, as if there’s something to be read there, a script, maybe, for how this interaction should go.

“I was…” Steve starts, not really sure what to say, wishing he had a script, too. He’s not made for this kind of piecemeal, hesitant conversation, coaxing and gentle. _What the hell_ , he thinks, and throws caution to the wind. “I was so worried about you.”

Bucky glances up, and he looks startled, now, and almost… almost touched. But the wound is still there, the one Steve had seen the day before yesterday, albeit covered over by something, a graft, a piece of gauze, the delicate pink skin of a new scar. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s fine,” Steve says awkwardly.

Now Bucky sits up straight and looks Steve full in the face. He’s not frowning, but his face is serious. The straight line of his dark brows cuts across his face, elegant and austere, and his eyes in the afternoon sunlight look like two chips of cobalt glass. “No, it’s not.”

It’s Steve’s turn to sit up straight and cross his arms over his chest. Are they actually going to argue about this? But at that moment, Carole Lombard interrupts him with the menu. He waves it away, like usual. “Two croque madames with runny eggs, please.” She smiles and walks back to the counter with the menu in her hand.

Bucky is still looking at him, his face a sober pink, his pursed mouth a strawberry red. Steve swallows. “So, yeah,” he says, still awkward. “It is. I mean, it’s fine. I know I upset you last time, and I want to tell you right off the bat that I’ve stopped.”

“Stopped what?”

“Stopped looking for you. Sam and I—remember Sam, my friend? I told you about him. He’s… he’s the one with the wings.” Bucky looks back down at the table, the poppy drooping again on its thin stalk. Steve drums his fingers on the table to bring Bucky’s attention back to him, but Bucky just looks at the fingers, not at him.

“All I want to say is that we’re not trying to find you anymore. We’re going back home. In fact, we are back home, I guess I _am_ in my own bed right now.” It’s true, they’d arrived late, nearly midnight, and Steve had dropped Sam off at his house before going back to his apartment, alone. It was strange to open the door and flick the light on, smell the thin layer of dust and the aura of disuse that had gathered there in the six weeks they’d been gone, and stranger still because it had suddenly become his _old_ apartment, a place in which to bide his time while he was waiting for a new home.

He had looked at the bullet hole in the wall where Bucky had shot Fury in Steve’s recliner—the recliner was gone, though, taken away by the crime scene people. He’d run his fingers over his stack of records, most of them bought by the same SHIELD intern who’d furnished the place, though a few were his, paid for with his own money. He’d dropped his duffel in front of the washing machine, not bothering to unpack more than his toothbrush. And then he’d brushed his teeth, taken off all his clothes, and crawled into bed under the blue-and-white quilt and fallen straight to sleep, too tired to brood over what fresh worries he’d find in his dreams tonight.

He shakes himself out of his reverie and looks at Bucky, who is staring at him open-mouthed, a strange combination of disbelief and indignance on his face.

“What?”

“You just… you gave up?” Bucky asks. A little furrow digs itself between his brows, a little crescent moon like the imprint of a thumbnail.

Steve is baffled. Was he… not supposed to? “Yeah? What did you want me to do, hunt you down after you asked me not to? You said please!”

Steve watches him backpedal in real time, like a dog when the cat it’s chasing turns around and hisses. “No, of course not, it’s just…”

“Just what,” Steve asks flatly, feeling annoyed.

And then there’s Carole Lombard, divine interruption, with two plates and two croque madames; the smell of butter and melting cheese and the hot, rich aroma of grilled ham makes his mouth water immediately. Pillowy, golden-brown pain de mie, ham, cheese, bechamel, and on top of it all like a priceless crown, there’s a fried egg, the yolk an iridescent orange sun rising over the horizon of its perfect, lacy-crisp white.

“I wish I could get a sandwich like this in real life,” Bucky murmurs from across the table.

“You probably can, if you go to France.” Steve holds the sandwich down with his bare fingers and uses his knife to cut it in two, right through the center of the runny yolk. It drips down over his knuckles, mingling with the butter, which he licks off with impunity. He’d never do something like that in real life, but the more time passes, the more he feels the inconsequential unreality of the dream, as if the more solid they become to each other, the more the diner fades around them.

“Maybe I _am_ in France, how do you know?” Bucky says lightly, but when Steve looks up, the new-laid egg of his good mood now marred by a crack, Bucky’s grin dims by a few degrees. “I’m not. Promise.” He holds up the hand not clutching his own knife in a soothing gesture.

Steve looks at him for a moment more. “Okay.” They eat in silence, each savoring their own sandwich in private. But when Steve has finally sated that first burst of gluttony, he swallows his mouthful and says, “So, just what?”

Bucky narrows his eyes and then immediately widens them. “Ah,” he says. “It’s just, that’s not the Steve Rogers I remember.”

Steve’s first instinct is to be indignant— _how dare—_ but it shifts immediately to bafflement, wonder, maybe even the first spark of joy he’s felt in weeks. “You… you remember me? That much of me?”

Bucky looks shifty. He sets his fork down on the plate and sits back, crossing his arms over his chest, looking away from Steve and out the window. The mid-afternoon sunlight that highlights the geometries of his face disappears and reappears, as if clouds are flying in front of the sun. “I’ve been getting a lot of my memories back. Each day there are more, and it seems to be exponential.”

“That’s amazing!” Steve says. “That’s great!”

The muscle at the hinge of Bucky’s jaw bunches up as he clenches his teeth. Steve gets distracted for a minute by looking at his profile, the way his jaw unbunches again and his tongue darts out unconsciously and wets his plump bottom lip. It takes him half a second to catch back up when Bucky says, “It’s a mixed blessing.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He remembers the file from Kiev. “I… I guess it would be.”

Bucky licks his lower lip again so that it gleams in the fast-running sunlight, and then turns around to face Steve. Any trace of inner turmoil is gone; there’s nothing on his face now but an impish delight. “But I remember some things about you.” He points his forefinger accusingly. “You were a little shit.”

“Oh my god,” Steve says.

“You got in a lot of fights, and you were also very small.” He makes a comprehensive gesture across the table at Steve’s torso. “That small, I guess. You were like a kitten that thought it was a lion. How did you survive?”

“Oh my fucking god,” Steve repeats. He drops his own knife and fork on the plate with a clatter and drops his head down into his palms, covering his face

Bucky laughs, a closed-mouth chuckle low in the back of his throat. It thrills Steve down to the soles of his feet, and he peeks through his fingers, almost shivering at the look on Bucky’s face, mischief and something that brushes up against fondness. “No really,” Bucky says, “it’s puzzling me.”

Steve heaves a huge, put-upon sigh into his greasy palms. Some small part of him thinks it’s hilarious that it’s impossible to escape this conversation; as soon as Bucky gets the smallest sliver of himself back, it’s _Steve, you reckless idiot_ this, and _sometimes I think you like getting punched_ that. “You always had my back,” he says, looking back up. “You stood up for me. You dragged me out of alleys and barrooms and theaters and anywhere else I decided was a fine hill to die on, and finished my fights when I couldn’t finish them myself.”

Bucky gazes at him, an inscrutable look in his eye. Sometimes, when Steve looks at him, he gets the same feeling as when he tries to read a page in Cyrillic, like he can puzzle out only a quarter of the meaning without a dictionary. Finally, Bucky says, “Inseparable on schoolyard and battlefield, huh?”

“Yep.” Steve grins at him, his biggest, toothiest grin. Best friends forever, the grin says, and he’s waiting for Bucky to return it, waiting for the mirror grin that is the other half of Steve’s cracked-heart friendship necklace.

But instead, Bucky swallows hard and looks away. Cloud shadows cycle across his face, bright, dim, bright, dim, and Steve waits in silence with his heart in his throat, where it seems to have made a second home.

“A while ago, you said…”

Steve waits. He counts his breaths, desperate not to interrupt. He gets to twenty and then loses count, and finally Bucky says, “You said you loved me.”

“I did.” Four days ago, if he remembers correctly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Carole Lombard round the corner of the counter.

Bucky doesn’t say anything else, but he looks back at Steve with something in his eyes like the first dawn after the winter solstice—nothing but brighter days ahead.

“I do,” Steve says.

Carole Lombard lays the check facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.

* * *

Steve starts packing the next day. First, he calls Sam, who he finds at home lying on his couch in his bathrobe, watching daytime TV and drinking mimosas.

“I thought you’d be back at work already,” Steve says.

“Some of us know how to take it easy, Rogers,” Sam retorts. There’s an obnoxious slurping noise from the other end of the line. Sam doesn’t sound drunk, he sounds relaxed, in a way that Steve’s never heard before. But, of course, Steve met Sam by lapping him in the most annoying way possible, and then they proceeded to nearly die uncovering a Hydra infiltration in the US government and, almost immediately after, started on a road trip across the eastern half of the US in order to track down Steve’s murderous boyfriend (old boyfriend? ex-boyfriend?). He’s known Sam for nearly two months, now, and he’s never actually seen him relaxed.

“Good for you, wish it was me,” Steve says, and he really, truly does.

Next, he calls Tony, who babbles down the line at him for fifteen minutes about Manhattan and real estate agents and penthouses before agreeing that they can just talk about it when Steve gets there.

Actually packing is less of an ordeal and doesn’t take that much longer. He pulls the half a dozen records that actually belong to him out of the stack and puts them, together with all his books, into a cardboard box that he’d bought at the post office. Into another box go the things he’d bought for the kitchen—the good spatula, the set of steak knives that actually cut steak, the handheld mixer, the kitchen torch, and his spice rack, which he’d just started curating when the world had crashed down around his ears.

His clothes fit into two duffels, toiletries on top, and then all that’s left is his pillow and the blue-and-white quilt, which he folds up carefully and stuffs inside a spare pillowcase to keep it clean.

Then he loads everything into the back of the loaner car and goes back up to the apartment one last time to look around and make sure he hasn’t forgotten anything. It’s strange to walk back through the door and know that this is no longer his house, although it looks like he still lives there. Everything is still in place, from the generic do-your-part propaganda art on the walls to the sepia-toned red-white-and-blue throw over the back of the couch; none of the seemingly personal touches were actually his, or even actually personal.

He imagines himself, briefly, lighting a match and touching it to the laminated particleboard bookshelf with its dusty stacks of mediocre spy novels and people’s histories of WWII and then standing on the threshold and watching contentedly as the whole apartment burns. But it doesn’t belong to him, and there are other people who live in this building. Plus, he doesn’t have any matches, and his kitchen torch is in the box in the back of the car. He tosses the keys onto the coffee table and pulls the door shut behind him.

Five hours later, he’s in New York.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and turns to the booth and grins at the one blue eye, brow arched over top like a drawn bow, that’s peeking over the top of the booth at him.

That night, lying down in the big, unfamiliar bed in the guest apartment in the Tower, Steve had felt a nervous flutter in the pit of his stomach. The phrases _you said you loved me_ — _I do_ sat there twittering like two canaries in a gilt cage while he tossed and turned, wanting desperately to fall asleep, afraid of what was going to happen when he did.

But when he gets to the table, Bucky just looks at him with the familiar bright, open grin on his happy, sunny face, and Steve feels some combination of relieved and giddy, though with a little smear of disappointment scraped over the top.

A cheerful Bucky combined with the thrill of moving that has followed him into the dream makes him a little harebrained, and when Carole Lombard comes to the table, he orders them a dozen chocolate cupcakes and two glasses of milk. Bucky looks nonplussed, completely thrown for a loop, but he evidently also subscribes to the maxim of _take it at face value_ , because he eventually shrugs and then digs into the cupcakes, eating three before Steve even gets the icing licked off his first one.

They laugh and banter until, after the third cupcake, Bucky gets a falling-down look on his face like he’s just caught sight of himself unexpectedly in a mirror, and he says, “I’m not... I’m not like this in the waking world. I’m… I’m not happy or funny or, or carefree.” He takes another cupcake from the tray in the center of the table and sets it on his crumb-strewn plate, but he doesn’t eat it, just pokes the paper lightly with a finger. “I don’t know why I’m like this in the dream.”

Steve feels like he should be treading carefully, but he can’t make out the path ahead. “Could be a lot of reasons,” he says. “You feel comfortable here,”—Bucky gives him a closed-off smile and tilts his head, a soft acknowledgement—“so this is the real you coming out, maybe.”

He can tell immediately that he’s made a misstep, his foot catching the tail of something soft and delicate instead of the solid floor. A frown pulls at the corner of Bucky’s mouth, but Steve keeps going—if he’s going to dig himself into a hole, at least then he’ll know which direction is up. “This is how you were before,” he says. “I mean, before the war. This,”—he waves his hands up and down indicating, he hopes, a general _everything_ and that Bucky will know what he means—"this is exactly how I remember you.”

Bucky’s face shatters into something openly hurt, a priceless vase with a crack through which the water leaks. “So I’m just…” He pauses, and swallows hard before he continues bitterly, “I’m like this because it’s how you remember me? Is this… do you want me to be the person I was before? That ain’t gonna happen, pal.”

Steve feels the pinch of remorse, but he’s getting angry, too. “I never said that. Stop putting words in my mouth.”

Bucky’s anger breaks as soon as Steve reproaches him. He looks down at the cupcake on his plate, takes it between his hands, and peels off the delicate, fluted paper with his long fingers. “Sorry.”

Steve’s not sure what to do with his own fingers; they’re sticky from the cupcake icing, and the napkins don’t help. Should he lick them? In lieu of doing anything, he just stretches his sticky hand out across the table, palm up, fingers open in invitation. Bucky doesn’t hesitate; he puts his cupcake down on the plate and takes Steve’s hand between both of his own, the right hand sliding underneath to cup the back of his hand, the left sliding over the top until Steve is caught between his palms like a pearl in an oyster shell.

The spark that jumps between them when their fingers touch this time is like the glitter of the sun off the surface of the sea, a hot-cold bright thing that’s there and gone in an instant.

He feels something clench in his gut—excitement, longing, trepidation, he’s not sure—and he has to swallow hard before he can say, “You don’t have to apologize, it’s okay. Look, I don’t have any control over this dream, as we’ve established. And I don’t think you have any control over it, either. I think I’m this way because it’s the way I remember myself, and you’re that way because… because it’s the way you remember yourself, too.”

He means Bucky’s smooth, unlined face and his lithe young body and his cheerful, changeable demeanor. But what of the ragged green shirt, then? The missing button? Does Bucky remember where it came from? Or where the button went? Inexorably, his eyes are drawn down to the torn collar, and the space where the button is missing jangles on his nerves like a wrong note in a musical chord.

Bucky snorts, drawing Steve’s attention back to his face. “I’m getting some memories back, but I don’t remember that much, Steve.”

“Look, they’ve… I’d really…” He wants to say _Come to New York, let a doctor take a look at you_ , but he knows that’s not going to go over well. So instead he goes on, “You don’t know exactly what they did to your brain, and I don’t think they did, either. I mean, you, this,”—he waves his free hand up and down again—"everything, all these things could be hiding in there somewhere, and you just don’t have access to them at the moment. Maybe… maybe it’s the way your subconscious sees itself.”

Bucky looks skeptical but mollified. “And what about you? Why do you look like that? Is that the way you see yourself?”

Steve looks down at his skinny bundle-of-sticks wrist caught between Bucky’s big, strong hands and unconsciously tries to pull away, but Bucky doesn’t let him. In fact, he grips Steve’s hand even tighter between his own, curling his fingers over the meat of his thumb, pulling him closer so that Steve has to lean over the table a little. Perversely, he feels a little part of his mind heave a sigh and let go, and the afternoon sun slanting in from the west gets a little brighter. He clears his throat. “Yeah. It is, actually. I…”

Bucky’s fingers stroke over the thin skin on his wrist. Steve imagines he can feel the lines of Bucky’s fingerprints as they ghost over his skin, a subtle ribbing like a piece of grosgrain ribbon. “Go on,” Bucky prompts.

“I, I’ve never felt very comfortable in my new body. See? See? That’s exactly what I mean, I still think about it as my _new_ body, even though I’ve had it for years, now. But it’s just so… so big.”

He flexes the arm in Bucky’s grip as much as he’s able to and gropes at his bicep through the thin fabric of his shirt with the fingers of his other hand. It’s thin, a spaghetti noodle, as Bucky used to say. A memory comes back to him suddenly like a curtain snapping in the breeze: He’s shaving his face at the sink in the old apartment, hand mirror propped precariously on the windowsill to catch the light. He sees Bucky come up behind him as he’s rinsing the razor and then feels his big, rough hand as it closes around his bicep. “Mmm,” Bucky murmurs, bending down to nuzzle his face into space behind Steve’s ear, which makes him squirm, though he doesn’t pull away. “My little spaghetti noodle.”

“Don’t fucking call me a spaghetti noodle, you meatball,” Steve says, but it’s an old retort to an old insult, both so comfortable and well-worn that they’ve lost all their meaning; they might as well be saying, _I love you_ and, _I love you, too_.

“I got your meatballs right here,” Bucky says, and Steve automatically adjusts his stance, spreading his legs a little as Bucky snakes a hand around his waist and down the front of his trousers and squeezes his balls lightly with the hand that’s not stroking the skin of Steve’s bare arm.

“Buck…” Steve starts, face half-shaved, flecks of lather everywhere, skin starting to itch, but Bucky goes right on, following the script like he has it memorized, which he does.

“You know what I want for dinner tonight?” he says, and of course Steve knows, but he plays his part, asks, “What do you want for dinner tonight?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Bucky says, already breathless, and spins Steve around so that his back is to the sink and starts unbuttoning his pants.

“Did I lose ya, pal?” Bucky says, and Steve almost jumps out of his skin. He realizes he’s been daydreaming—nightdreaming?—and _what_ a daydream it was. He blinks a few times and wonders if there’s more blood in his face or his cock, but when he glances surreptitiously down at his lap, there’s no hard-on, nothing more provocative than the bulge his zipper makes in the material of his trousers.

He can feel it, though, a palimpsest of desire and arousal, the dream having an effect on his sleeping body, which is having an effect in the dream. This is like the panic attack all over again. He shakes his head to clear it and to give himself a little plausible deniability; he was just thinking about something, that’s all, nothing out of the ordinary.

Bucky’s hands are still clasped around his, his fingers moving in a restless pitter-patter over Steve’s wrist.

“What were we talking about?” Steve asks.

Bucky grins at him, and maybe it’s not exactly affection that he sees there, but it’s adjacent, and that’s good enough for Steve. “You were saying that you don’t feel comfortable in your real body because it’s too big, and that _that_ ”—he flicks his eyebrows at Steve’s torso—“is the way you see yourself.”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. And also, I feel like, when I was in this body was really the last time I was…” He pauses, but Bucky waits, just looking at him, patient and receptive. “The last time I was really happy.”

Bucky’s expression melts, and it’s not pity that Steve sees there, but recognition, fellow-feeling. “Well,” he says with half a bitter laugh, “I’m absolutely sure that _this_ ”—he pulls his left hand off of Steve’s palm and gestures to his own self, now—"was the last time _I_ was happy.”

Steve looks down at their hands again; his fingers are curled in on themselves, an egg nestled in the cradle of Bucky’s palm. They sit in silence for a long while.

“Do you think we’ll be happy again?” Steve blurts out without thinking through the implications, and then kicks himself. _Idiot._

Bucky looks sad, rueful. “I don’t know pal,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Steve turns his hand over so that they’re palm to palm and rubs his own fingers across Bucky’s wrist. They’re still sticky from the cupcake icing, and he feels the way the sugar residue plucks at Bucky’s skin, like invisible octopus suckers, like even his fingerprints can’t bear to let Bucky go. Neither one of them speaks again, both focused on their hands clasped together in the middle of the table, and a few minutes later, Carole Lombard appears with the check. She lays it facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to [Alpaca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/profoundalpacakitten) for answering my 9283742983743 questions about croque madames (and jambon-beurres)


	9. Chapter 9

Apparently, things move fast in the New York City real estate scene, or at least they do if your name is Tony Stark and you have a real estate agent on retainer. Tony zooms into Steve’s guest apartment at half past seven while Steve is sipping his first cup of coffee and stops short in the kitchen with an audible screech. “Are you still in your pajamas?” he asks, peering at Steve over the top of a ridiculous pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses.

“Mm hmm,” Steve says, which is about all he can manage. He’d laid in bed for half an hour after he’d woken up, half awake, replaying the dream in his head, savoring the phantom tickle of Bucky’s fingers over his wrist. But when he’d gone to touch the same place, the illusion had broken; his wrist, now, was a big, square thing like a cast iron padlock, attached to a forearm that was ropy and thick with muscle.

“Well, get a fucking move on, Cap,” Tony says waspishly. “My real estate agent’s coming by at eight, and he’s already got a list of places to show you and the day isn’t as young as it could be.”

“When did _you_ wake up, Tony?” Steve says over the rim of his coffee cup. “Or, rather, when did you go to sleep?”

Tony makes a withered, sour face and rolls his eyes. “Come on, seriously, I thought you goody-two-shoes types all got up at five o’clock to do calisthenics. You’re getting slow in your old age, and Manhattan penthouses wait for no one!”

Steve had been about to make some smart retort about the relative values of the word ‘good,’ but at the last phrase he makes an about-face. “Wait a second, I’m not looking in Manhattan. I want to move to Brooklyn.”

Tony clutches at his heart and gapes and staggers about the kitchen theatrically. “Brooklyn? _Brooklyn??_ ”

Steve feels a half second’s annoyance, but then he grins into his coffee, hiding behind the cup because he doesn’t want Tony to see that he’s amused.

Finally, Tony tires himself out and comes to a halt. “Alright, whatever, I don’t have time to argue about it. I’ll tell the agent he can toss out his list and start looking for something a little more lowbrow. Out thataway.” He waves his hand at the windows, which Steve knows for a fact face in the wrong direction, out west towards Newark. “Don’t call him, he’ll call you,” Tony says over his shoulder, and breezes back out the way he’d come in.

Steve finishes his coffee and orders breakfast from the café in the lobby and manages to get a shower and have half his clothes on by the time the real estate agent calls him, asking if Steve could meet him in the lobby as soon as possible because the car with the chauffeur is waiting out front.

That’s how he finds himself, three houses, four apartments, and five hours later, standing in the middle of the open-plan attic of a narrow little brick row house in the middle of Greenpoint. It’s three blocks from the subway and three stories tall, with only two bedrooms on the second floor. But the third floor is an attic converted into one big room, three gabled windows on each side looking both west and east, and a tall, peaked ceiling. He can stand up comfortably under the roofbeam, and the old wooden floor under his feet creaks and croaks like a pond full of frogs when he shifts his weight.

_Bedroom-slash-studio_ , he thinks. He can already smell the oil paints, the turpentine, the clean, starched scent of newly-washed sheets, all mingled together. _Perfect._

“It’s gorgeous,” he tells the real estate agent, a thin man named Charles who is wearing a muted check suit and a dark grey tie cinched tight around his neck, despite the fact that it’s the beginning of June and the weather is starting to turn hot. “I love it. I want to put an offer on it, but I’ll need to talk to my… talk to my partner, first.” He doesn’t really know how to explain the situation with Sam, and he definitely doesn’t know how to explain Bucky, so he doesn’t even try. If Charles is surprised that Captain America has a partner, he doesn’t show it.

“I can give you a definitive answer tomorrow, though.” Steve twirls around again and thinks about where his easel’s going to go—probably under the eaves on the east side of the house, overlooking the small backyard, in order to catch the morning light. And his bed? Under the west-facing windows, between the wall and the stairwell. He imagines, idly, a big oak bed with a slatted headboard and four posts and the blue-and-white quilt spread over top of it and immediately feels a prickle of tears in the back of his sinuses. He sniffs once or twice and rubs his nose as surreptitiously as he can.

Charles seems to see nothing amiss. “Tomorrow will be fine,” he says. “I can arrange with the owner to keep it off the market for twenty-four hours, and if you decide to take it, we’ll put in an offer immediately.”

When Steve gets back to the Tower, he flops down on the couch in the living room and calls Sam to tell him the news.

“Jesus christ,” Sam says. “You’ve been there less than twenty-four hours, I had no idea you were going to work so fast.”

“Me neither. It was Tony, actually. Stark Industries has its own real estate agent.” He puts his feet up on the glossy coffee table and picks at an invisible loose thread on the sofa cushion. “All I had to do was tell the guy a little bit about what I wanted and he showed me a couple places and boom, there it was. Tony was pretty put out when I told him I wanted to move to Brooklyn, though.”

Sam laughs low in his ear. “He would be.” Steve can hear a muffled _clank_ from the other end of the line; it sounds like he’s setting something down in the sink. “How’s the kitchen?”

“Great, it was redone a couple years ago. I’ll send you pictures when we hang up. It has two ovens, though. I don’t know what you need two ovens for, Sam.”

“Pssh. Of course you wouldn’t.” If he closes his eyes, he can see the exact expression Sam has on his face, his eyebrows drawn down in skeptical derision, his mouth pursed to one side as he tries to hide his smile.

“Hey, I know how to bake!” Steve goes to make a list of his baking accomplishments, but it takes him a while to remember the last time he’d actually used the oven in his DC apartment. Baking loses its luster quickly when there’s no one around to help eat the results. “Uh, banana bread, I can do banana bread.”

“Not like me, you can’t,” Sam says, smugness oozing down the invisible telephone line.

“Alright, alright,” Steve says, forfeiting the game. He’s about to wind the call up, he gets as far as saying, “So—” when Sam interrupts him.

“Look, there was one other thing I wanted to say, and I’m glad you called before you actually went and bought the place, because this could be a dealbreaker for me.”

“Alright?” Steve feels a little trepidation, but not much. This is Sam, what could he possibly be concerned about?

“If you want me to live with you, I… I would like you to think about looking for a therapist,” he says hesitantly. “I don’t want to ruin this beautiful friendship by feeling like I can’t leave work at work.”

“Oh.” Yeah, of course that’s what Sam would be concerned about. What can he say, though? It goes without saying that his first inclination is to say no, his second is to stuff the phone under the couch cushions and throw himself out the shatter-proof window. But that’s just base instinct and its old pal, animal panic; he knows Sam’s right. However… “I’ve already been to therapy. When I got out of the ice. It was mandated by SHIELD.”

There’s a short silence at the other end of the line. “Okay,” Sam finally says, “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. You’re far more well-adjusted than I’d expected when I first met you.”

Steve pumps his fist in victory, even though he’s alone and there’s no one to see him but his own distorted reflection in the giant flat-screen TV on the wall. But then Sam goes on, “But you’re dealing with something new, now, something really difficult to process, and you need to talk to somebody about that. Therapy’s not a one-and-done thing, you know,” he adds, softer.

Steve knows he’s going to say yes, it’s not even in question. Yeah, Sam’s right, and Steve recognizes it. But he also knows that he’d make a lot of concessions not to have to live alone again. A nice kitchen and therapy don’t seem like very much, when he thinks about it that way.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll do it. You’re right. Just… I have to actually buy this house and move and everything, so give me a grace period, alright?”

“Oh jesus, of course,” Sam says, sounding a little surprised. “Take as much time as you need. I just… I didn’t want it to be a problem later.” After a moment he adds, “Thanks for hearing me out.”

“No problem, I know you’re in the right. I also want you to be just my friend Sam who bakes, not my friend Sam the therapist who listens to all my problems.”

“Hey, I can listen to your problems if we’re friends, it’s what friends do.”

“Yeah, but not like that.”

“No,” Sam agrees, “not like that.”

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and turns to the booth and grins at Bucky peeking over the top.

He’d thought, as he’d laid in bed that night waiting for sleep to take him, about how he was going to tell Bucky about the house, how to run it by him without making it look like Steve is asking for his approval. Which he is, he absolutely needs Bucky’s approval. He could never buy a house that Bucky would find impossible to consider a home, even if he’s not sure Bucky will ever see the inside of it.

He slides into the booth and says, without preamble, “Guess what, I’m moving to Brooklyn.”

Bucky blinks at him a few times and then a slow, easy grin spreads over his face. “Got tired of DC?” he asks, an ebullient spark tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Steve shrugs. “There wasn’t anything keeping me there, now that SHIELD is in tatters. Sam’s moving to New York, too. And anyway, you know, Brooklyn is home.” He watches Bucky’s face intently as he says this, but nothing mars the beautiful luster of his smile. His eyes are two bright flickers between his dark lashes, and his grin pushes his cheeks up into two pink apricots with the freckled bridge of his nose between them.

Steve laces his fingers together on the tabletop to give himself something else to look at. “Also, uh, I found the house I want to buy already, it’s in Greenpoint.”

“Already?” Bucky says disbelievingly. “You just got to New York yesterday.”

Steve is still looking down at his hands on the table, but he can see in his peripheral vision the way that Bucky freezes, a lag in the fluid, easy way he carries himself that disappears as quickly as it comes. A slip of the tongue; Steve wasn’t supposed to hear that. He’s very proud of the way he doesn’t freeze, himself, the way he keeps his face set in the same easy grin when he looks up. He wants to leap across the table, shout _How do you know that, are you in New York too??_ but he settles for meeting Bucky’s eyes, instead. They’re wide and wary, his lips pressed into a thin line cut deep across his face.

Steve shrugs, but before he can say anything, Carole Lombard appears at the table with the menu. “Uhhh,” he says, holding his hand up to keep her from leaving. He’d completely forgotten to think of something to order, what with the house and everything. “Um, two BLTs and two cokes, please,” he says. Might as well go back to the start. 

She leaves and he ducks his head, scratching the back of his neck, trying to remember what the hell they were talking about before Bucky had slipped up. “Oh, the house, right. Well, the real estate market moves fast in New York these days, I guess,” he says easily.

Bucky nods slowly, as if in agreement, but Steve feels like he’s being watched from behind the façade of Bucky’s face. Or rather, Bucky’s face is well and truly his own, but behind the easy grin it falls into, he’s frantically taking notes on Steve and his micro-reactions and his intonations and the way he unconsciously carries himself. Steve feels like he’s taking a test, but he’s lost his glasses and his pencil, he doesn’t even know what class he’s in, and he’s not even sure he knows how to read.

But whatever conclusion Bucky finally comes to must be a good one, because he leans over and braces his arms on the tabletop and says, “Tell me about the house.”

So Steve tells him about it, the small unfinished basement with the washer and dryer that smells like damp, but not in a bad way. The big bay window in the living room with the built-in window seat, the two bedrooms on the second floor and the big hall bathroom with the clawfoot tub. He tells him about the neighborhood, how there are half-a-dozen takeout places within a block of the house, how the street is quiet and lined with trees. The one directly in front of the big bay window isn’t an oak, like he’d imagined, but a hickory, a youngish one with a narrow black trunk. The well around its roots is planted with petunias, and in the fall, its leaves will turn a rich golden yellow, like goldenrod, or sunflowers.

Carole Lombard comes back with the BLTs and the cokes, and Bucky eats his methodically while Steve holds his in one hand and gestures with the other, bits of tomato and lettuce falling out the back of it.

He tells him about the kitchen and its two ovens and the island and the turquoise backsplash, and the tiny backyard that’s mostly concrete, but which could hold a garden, if someone had the time and energy to put into turning it around. And then he tells him about the top floor, the big open attic with all the light pouring in through the windows, the easel, the bed. “I’m going to put it in the corner by the stairwell under the west-facing windows so it won’t get the full force of the sun in the morning. And I’ll cover it with the blue-and-white quilt.”

He peers intently at Bucky to see if something changes in his face, but nothing does. He looks like he’s hanging on Steve’s every word, but not as if any of them meant anything to him, other than that they were Steve’s words. Steve is a little disappointed, but he stuffs it down deep inside.

“It sounds really nice,” Bucky says wistfully. “I hope you’re happy there.”

“It’s just a house,” Steve says nonsensically, looking at his sandwich crushed between his fingers. There’s a whole tomato slice on his plate, crumbs of bacon stuck to it, the perfect blood-red color of summer. He can almost smell the sharp, green spice of the tomato vines his ma used to plant in tubs on the fire escape. They were never very good tomatoes—poor dirt, not enough light—but they were theirs, and that was enough to make them taste like tart ambrosia.

Bucky clears his throat while Steve is thinking and says, “You said last time that when you were in that body was the last time you were happy.”

Steve looks up at him again. Bucky’s looking at him seriously, his brows a straight line mimicking the sober cut of his mouth, and there’s a question in his eyes that Steve can’t interpret. “Uh huh?”

“So why… why were you happy?”

_Ah._ Steve can feel a big welling up of something inside him, a bubble two hundred million years old that rises from the ocean floor where it’s been liberated by the inevitable erosion of the deep-sea currents. How long until it breaks the surface of the ocean, before it reaches the open air? “I… how much do you know? Or better, exactly how much do you remember? About when we were young. Before the war.”

Bucky looks away. It’s not that he’s shifty, but there’s something wary on his face, like he doesn’t want to tell Steve the whole truth. Or at least not until Steve tells him the whole truth, first. “I know some. I’ve read some things. I went to the museum. But they don’t talk much about before the war. Only after. Inseparable on schoolyard—”

“—and battlefield,” Steve finishes. He notices that Bucky doesn’t answer the question about how much he remembers. Better start at the beginning, then. He can gauge as he goes what exactly to reveal and what to keep hidden in his hand like the ace of spades, the collapsible silk flowers. “Well, we both grew up in Brooklyn. We met when I was six and you were seven and you knocked down a kid that was beating me up because I’d punched him because he’d knocked down another kid.”

Bucky grins, the wariness gone from his face for the moment. “Is that right?”

Steve grins back. “Can’t say I’m not consistent. Anyway, we were basically best friends from day one. I saw you more than I saw anybody else, and we were hardly ever apart except for when we had to go to school, ‘cause you were a year ahead of me, or when I had to go to mass, ‘cause you weren’t Catholic, or when I was sick and you weren’t allowed in the house ‘cause you might catch it.”

Bucky’s face turns soft, soft and concerned, and it melts Steve’s heart that he looks concerned for a boy who disappeared seventy years ago. “You were sick a lot?” he asks, and Steve can’t tell if he’s asking a question or trying to jog his own memory.

“All the damn time,” he says. “Not always with something you could have caught, and sometimes I just had a regular fever or a cold. But whereas you would have sniffled into your handkerchiefs for a couple of days, it knocked me flat on my ass for two weeks.”

“That’s a long time to be apart if you’re best friends,” Bucky says. The certainty of the statement strikes Steve all of a sudden, the fact that it comes from a place of knowledge. Bucky knows what a best friend is, what best friendship is like. _So he_ does _remember,_ Steve thinks, drawing the inevitable conclusion.

And then a little voice whispers in his ear, _Seventy years is a long time to be apart if you’re best friends._ Steve looks down at his hands and waits for the inevitable prickle of tears in his nose, but it doesn’t come; instead he feels the timid knock of optimism on the door of his heart. _So he_ does _remember._

He looks back up and waves his hand breezily. “Oh, if you had the go-ahead from my ma, you came to visit every day, brought me comics and read me books and helped me keep caught up on schoolwork and stuff like that.”

Bucky is smiling at him softly, his pink, poppy-petal mouth turned up at the corners. “I must have really liked you, then,” he says, and it hurts so sweetly to hear those words come out of that face. It’s the same face that whispered sweet nothings in Steve’s ear late at night, the same mouth that dropped soft kisses like raindrops down the wobbly line of his spine and then bit the thin skin over his hips until he looked like he’d been mauled by a vampire. The same nose that stuck itself into his crotch when Bucky got in a mood _—stop squirming, just let me get a sniff—you’re disgusting—yeah, but you love it_. The same flushed cheeks and freckled nose and the same dimple in his chin where Steve would press his thumb softly, and then with a quick, sharp bite of his thumbnail, leaving his mark.

He looks down at his uneaten sandwich on his plate. “Yeah…” he says softly. Carole Lombard appears beside the table and lays the check facedown with a smile as Steve says, “You did.”

He wakes up.

* * *

Steve’s offer on the house is accepted, and he moves in two days later with his two boxes of stuff and his two duffels of clothes and his shield in its round cymbal case that says Zildjian on it in a pretty white script. Tony wheedles and pleads and tries to get Steve to accept his offer of decorating help, of some Stark intern with a catalogue of actual vintage home goods and an unlimited budget, but Steve turns him down firmly again and again and he finally gets the message. And then when Steve says he’s going to take the subway out to the Ikea in Red Hook and see what they have in the way of furniture, Tony storms out of the guest apartment in a huff, and Steve doesn’t see him again before he leaves.

That night he sleeps restlessly on a pile of his clothes on the floor of the attic and meets Bucky in the diner, where they talk about this and that, but not _you said you loved me,_ or _I must have really liked you,_ or _if you’re best friends_ or any of the other things that Steve desperately wants to talk about.

Bright and early the next day, he gets up and calls Sam and then walks from room to room with the telephone held between his ear and his shoulder, making a list of everything he needs to buy. Sam is gently exasperated that Steve doesn’t know he needs floor lamps as well as hanging lamps, but Steve just says, “SHIELD furnished that whole apartment in DC”—he can’t even bring himself to say _my_ whole apartment—“and obviously before then I either lived in an army regulation tent or a tenement where we were lucky to have electricity instead of a kerosene lamp.”

Sam clucks and says, “Alright, alright, I already know the whole story, you don’t have to tell me again,” but it’s gently affectionate instead of exasperated, and they move on to arguing about whether Sam’s couch is going to be big enough or if Steve needs to buy another one.

Ikea is a revelation—he’d known that it existed, of course, but it was a theoretical knowledge, like the way he knows that Neptune exists, or the bottom of the sea. It takes him a while to wrap his head around the size of the place and the sheer abundance of furniture and linens and pillows and _items_. He fills up a huge yellow shopping bag with things he hadn’t even considered he might need—a bottle opener, a cork trivet, a three-pack of scissors. He has no towels, no soap dispenser; even the clothes hangers had been left behind in DC. Pretty soon he needs another bag, and then a cart.

He’d been afraid that it was going to take a long time to pick out furniture, but right away he figures out that if he sticks to the criteria of sturdy, solid, and simple, there is usually one piece in each section that leaps out at him immediately. He quietly abuses each display piece a little, checking to see that it won’t fall apart if it is, for example, leaned on heavily, or picked up six inches and dropped. If it passes the test, Steve makes a note on the list with those tiny pencils that he has to hold delicately between his thumb and forefinger, because holding them like normal pencils means they disappear into his paw like a palmed quarter.

Finally, he has two shopping carts piled six feet high with flat-pack furniture and rugs and three bags filled with everything else, and he drags them awkwardly to the line at the registers. He looks at the mountain of things he’s going to buy and starts to panic a little, but quietly. He thinks of a tiny two-room tenement apartment, of a bed whose mattress had a valley in the middle and a headboard that was made of scrap lumber nailed together, of a chair whose fourth leg was a stack of old pulps, of a bookshelf made from two wire milk crates tied together with string. He thinks about putting everything back and leaving, or maybe giving into more wicked instincts and just abandoning the carts and running through the big revolving doors and into the hot, blue, mid-June afternoon.

But he closes his eyes for a moment and thinks about Bucky, and that’s all it takes to settle the flutter of agitation against the inside of his ribs. He imagines Bucky leaning over the arm of the couch to switch on the lamp when the sun goes down behind the apartment building across the street and it gets too dark to read. He thinks about Bucky scuffing his bare feet on the butter-yellow wool carpet, about his long fingers curled around the bottle opener, already halfway sunk into the cork of a good bottle of wine.

He thinks about the bed—no posts, but a slatted headboard, and not made of oak, but ash—under the gabled windows, the light of the fresh sunrise slanting in through the windows on the other side of the room. He imagines the blue-and-white quilt on the bed and Bucky curled underneath it, a long parenthesis with his dark hair spread across the white cotton pillowcase.

“Excuse me,”—a woman is tapping his shoulder—“the line’s moved up.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t paying attention,” he says, and pushes his heavy carts forward, suddenly feeling an incredible lightness of being, as if his perpetually leaded-glass heart had turned into a paper lantern, marked with a delicate calligraphy and glowing from within.

* * *

He gets the furniture delivered and then spends the evening eating takeout pho from a place around the corner and putting the bed together. The mattress is a strange thing rolled up in a box that springs apart in his face when he releases the straps that hold it tight, like a trick snake in a can. He imagines he’s going to have to replace it soon—it wasn’t expensive, and he’s hard on pillows and mattresses, not to mention shoes and clothes—but it’s good enough for now.

That night, he lies down on the new bed in the new house and looks up at the ceiling with its thick oak roofbeam running down the middle like the house’s backbone. Which makes him, he supposes, the house’s heart, soft and warm and delicate inside its four white walls, lying in the cradle of ash with the quilt pulled up to his waist. He smooths his hand over his bare chest and feels the steady beating of his own heart, willing it to slow down, waiting to go to sleep.

Some time later, he’s putting his hand on the glass of the door and pushing it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and walks over to the booth, sliding into his side and presenting Bucky with his biggest grin.

“I got furniture today,” he says, and then when Bucky says, “Oh yeah?” he tells him all about Ikea— _you would not_ believe _it, the abundance, it’s just… phew—_ while they’re waiting for Carole Lombard to come with the menu and, afterwards, for their food. Burgers, today, medium rare and with an egg on the top.

“You have to build it yourself?” Bucky asks incredulously, and a little later, “It cost you _how much??_ ”

“Don’t ask me how much the house cost, I’ve forgotten on purpose,” Steve says with a laugh.

The burgers arrive; crunchy lettuce, juicy tomato, smashed patty fried crisp around the edges and a hole cut into the bun to poke the yolk through. Perfect.

As usual, they start to eat and Bucky wolfs his burger down while Steve waves his around in his hand, egg yolk and ketchup dripping down his wrist, and talks about going to Red Hook on the subway. Finally, he looks at the two bites of burger that Bucky has left on his plate and the two bites he’s taken out of his own and says, “I’m going to shut up for a minute.” Bucky laughs at him, a flip and delightful sound like a bass clef glissando.

Steve eats and tries not to moan—the burger really is that good—while Bucky watches him with his friendly, careful eyes. When Steve is almost done, Bucky finally pops his last bite into his mouth and wipes his hands on the napkin and says, no warning whatsoever, “You said, a while ago, that you loved me.”

Steve chokes on a bit of soggy burger bun and pounds on his thin chest, raw bone under skin, until he calms down. “Sorry, I… sorry,” he says, not really sure what he’s apologizing for.

“You said that you loved me,” Bucky repeats, as if Steve hadn’t heard him the first time, as if it weren’t cut deep into the soft wax tablet of his short-term memory. 

“I did.” _I do_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t want to say it again. He’s walking on the razor’s edge, here. It feels increasingly like he’s the one who is being won over, as if he weren’t already forfeiting the game, as if he wouldn’t just roll over and show his belly at the slightest provocation. _Nat was right to be worried_ , he thinks, _though not about his intentions_.

He doesn’t want to scare Bucky off, which is exactly what would happen if he flung himself across the table and into Bucky’s lap like he wants to. But he can’t lie to him, either; something tells him that dreamland Bucky would be just as good at picking up on his falsehoods as real-life Bucky was, all those many years ago.

“Tell me,” Bucky says.

Steve looks away, over to the corner or the table. The formica is chipped and the tin border that runs round the rim of the table is bent, as if someone had dropped a bowling ball on it. “Look, there are some things you should know, eventually. But I’m not sure you need to know them now. I want you to be safe and healthy and happy, however you go about making that happen, and I don’t want you to feel obligated to me in any way…”

“Steve.” He sounds annoyed, and Steve glances up. Bucky _is_ annoyed, his eyebrows pulled down in a frown, his lips pursed, curving down at the corners. He’s looking at Steve with such soft, familiar frustration that Steve feels like bursting into tears.

“What?”

“I’m trying to put myself back together and I need all the pieces I can find. Please don’t hold anything back because you think I might feel obligated to you. I just want to know.”

Steve swallows hard. “Okay.” He feels a strange halting sensation, and it takes him a second to realize that it’s bashfulness. It shocks him, because he’s never been bashful in his life, and it’s the shock that lets him push through it. “We were together.”

“Together?” He knows Bucky knows what he means, but that he’s asking for clarification. Steve understands; he couldn’t bear to think he was wrong about this, either.

“Yeah, _together_ together. I fell in love with you when I was sixteen,”—there, he’s said it, _he said it_ , and now that the words are out of his mouth he feels something rush through his body like the hissing dispersion of an electric shock; he looks down at his fingers, half expecting to see sparks—"and when I figured out you felt the same way, a couple years later, we... we never looked back. But honestly, I loved you when you pulled me up by the arm on the playground when I was six and I loved you at sixteen and at twenty-one and I loved you until the day you died.” He wants to crow, _ha ha!,_ feels it hard to tamp down his smile, but when he glances back up again, Bucky looks so serious that all his giddy agitation disappears in an instant. 

“And now?” Bucky asks.

Steve finds himself licking his lips, over and over, as if he can somehow produce the right words by friction. “I told you, Buck, I don’t want you to feel—"

“Answer the question, Steve,” he interrupts.

“Yes. Of course. I still love you, right now. I’ve always loved you. I’ll never stop.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, his face an impassive mask. Steve can’t tell whether his silence is confusion, disbelief, abject horror? Afraid that maybe he hasn’t been convincing enough, and desperate, now, to make sure that Bucky knows, Steve blurts out, “Don’t you remember, on the helicarriers, I dropped my shield for you, I would have rather died than have to see you die, I was—”

Bucky frowns again, and cuts him off with a wave of his hand. “Don’t you remember that I pulled you out of the water? I didn’t even know who I was, but I knew I had to save you, that you were the most important thing on the planet.”

Steve can feel his heart racing in his chest. Maybe it’s not the right thing to do, to make such a confession and then ask for comfort, but he reaches out, anyway. Bucky grasps his hand in the middle of the table immediately, and holds it tight. The electrical connection sparks between their fingers, and the golden busy-beehive hum that Steve hadn’t even known was buzzing in his ears gets louder, and then fades out completely.

“Every day it’s harder to wake up from this dream,” he says after a moment of silence that stretches like invisible filaments of spider silk between them. Bucky is moving his thumb—the left one—in tiny circles on the shallow divot where Steve’s wrist meets his palm and the tendons stand out in sharp relief. He feels mesmerized, and doesn’t notice Carole Lombard until she’s right next to the table.

“Wait, wait, we’re not ready yet,” he says, looking up sharply, but she just smiles her enigmatic smile and lays the check facedown on the table.

He wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve's house-buying process is the most unrealistic part of this whole fic, don't @ me


	10. Chapter 10

When he opens his eyes, he’s lying on his stomach looking out across the empty floor of the attic bedroom. The quilt is kicked down to the end of the bed, the room dark and quiet. From where his head is turned on the pillow, he can see out the leftmost window toward the east, but the sky is just a soft black, only the faintest smear of navy near the horizon. It must be early, very early; these days, right on the cusp of the summer solstice, the sun comes up at half past five. He shuts his eyes again and is shifting restlessly around on the bed, trying to find the position that will allow him to fall back asleep again, when he smells it: fresh-brewed coffee.

Immediately his heart leaps into his throat, _It’s Bucky_ , he thinks, every muscle fiber tightening into quivering purpose at the thought that Bucky is waiting for him downstairs, the dream made flesh drinking coffee in his kitchen. But in nearly the same instant, a cold deluge of rational thought is dumped over his head. Bucky would… he would have said something, he’d come during the day, he wouldn’t sneak in silently just to give himself away by messing around in the kitchen. Besides, Steve reluctantly suspects that Bucky’s not ready yet.

No, there’s only one person who would show up in the middle of the night and help themselves to Steve’s coffee.

He slips out of bed and tiptoes to the top of the stairs. The wooden boards creak; he hasn’t learned the house’s anatomy yet, where to tread and what spots to avoid if he wants to be silent. He can see the faint glow of a light filtering up the staircase from the kitchen two floors below, probably the dim 40-watt bulb in the extractor fan over the stove.

“Nat?” he calls, even though he knows it’s her.

“How’d you guess?” Her husky voice floats up from below like a ribbon of sweet-smelling smoke. He walks over to his pile of clothes and finds a pair of shorts and a shirt to slip on, then goes downstairs, running his hand along the banister, comfortingly polished by the passage of other palms on thousands of other mornings just like this one.

She’s sitting on the kitchen island with her feet tucked up under her, flicking through something on her phone. There’s a cup of coffee steaming gently beside her and another one in her hand. She glances up at him with a grin, but at the first look at his face, her grin disappears and she says, “Oh, I’m sorry, Steve.”

“What for?”

“You thought I was him.”

He shrugs. “For just a second, but then I realized you weren’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m so happy to see you.” He leans against the island and slouches down a little so that he can put his head on her shoulder. She locks her phone and sets it facedown on the counter under her knee, and then raises her hand up to the back of his neck to scritch at his hair. After a moment he wraps his arms around her waist and closes his eyes, letting the pressure of her fingers soothe the tense spots at the back of his skull, basking in the feeling of being touched purposefully, a rarity, a luxury for someone like him.

“You just visiting?” he asks. His voice feels heavy and slow to leave his lips, like part of him is already being lulled back to sleep. It takes him longer than usual to wake up these days, one foot on land and one still caught in the sea of unconsciousness.

“Yeah, can’t stay more than a few hours. Thought maybe you could show me around your new place, make me breakfast, but—"

“I just moved in two days ago, I don’t have any food,” he finishes.

She reaches around and pinches his cheek softly in retaliation for interrupting. “Which is why I brought cheese Danishes. And a little jar of honey I picked up for you somewhere. Just a souvenir.”

He pushes himself upright and turns to the counter next to the refrigerator; there’s a paper bag of Danishes, promisingly greasy on the bottom, and a squat little jar of honey, half the size of a jam jar. The honey inside is very dark and very thick, like molasses. There’s no label, but on the red-and-white checkered lid it says _Miel de bosque, San Miguel del Robledo_ , written in wax pencil in an unfamiliar hand.

“Where’s this from?” he asks as he opens the cupboard and gets out some of his new plates.

Nat tuts softly, “You know if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

He laughs under his breath. “Don’t give me that spy shit. You can tell me, I won’t spill the beans.” He puts on the most atrocious accent he can muster. “I could give you my word as a Spaniard.”

“No good,” she says seriously, “I’ve known too many Spaniards.”

He turns around and gives her a smile over his shoulder; she smiles back, dimples in her cheeks. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he says again.

Her smile turns soft and fond and just a little tired around the edges. “Well, welcome back to New York, I guess.”

After they eat all the cheese Danishes and split another pot of coffee between them, he shows her all around the house. She oohs and ahhs at the right parts and makes appreciative noises as he tells her about the furniture he’d bought and where it’s going to go, but he can also tell that she’s checking sightlines and escape routes, making sure that it’s a safe place for him to live. It warms his heart; some very elementary part of him feels small and protected even while he towers over her, standing in the bathroom while she admires the clawfoot tub and looks askance at the frosted bathroom window.

When they get up to the attic, the sun is coming up over the buildings behind the house, and the sky is the velvety yellow-pink of a ripe peach. She walks over to his unmade bed and takes hold of the quilt by the bottom, flicking her wrists so that it blooms out over the mattress in one great puff and floats down to settle, perfectly situated, the blue and white triangles flying at right angles to the headboard. Then she walks around and smooths it out under her hand before she sits down on the edge of the bed.

“I love this quilt.”

Steve sits down beside her and then flops down on his back. “Me too.” She bounces lightly on the shockwave that ripples through the mattress, then flops down, too, her coppery hair tickling the soft inside of his arm. He looks up at the ceiling, at the roofbeam, now bathed in the diffuse reflection of the warm light filtering in through the windows.

“Like Ares comes the bridegroom,” she murmurs under her breath, “taller far than a tall man.”

“What?”

Nat just shakes her head. “It’s a good house, Steve,” she says from down near his armpit. “I approve.”

“Thanks, I’m glad to hear it.” The room grows brighter by increments, the first rays of the rising sun streaming through the windows to hit the opposite wall.

“So what now?” Nat says. “You’re just going to sit around and wait for him to come in?”

“Yep.” They lie in silence for a while, Steve watching the way the quality of light changes as the sun rises all the way above the horizon, Nat swinging her leg back and forth and gently kicking him in the calf.

“He’s changed his M.O.,” she says out of the blue. “He’s not taking down bases, anymore. There’s been no sign of him, and no unusual anti-Hydra activity beyond what the big agencies are doing. He seems to have disappeared.”

Steve doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “I think he’s in New York.”

She goes still; her leg stops its swinging and she lies under the tree branch of his arm like a little red apple. “Why do you think that?” she says eventually.

“Because the other day, the day after I came up from DC, I said I’d already found this house, and he said, ‘That was quick, you just got to New York yesterday.’ And I could tell that he knew he’d slipped up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” she asks, her voice even, curious. She could be hurt, or furious, he can’t tell. He almost sits up so he can look at her face, but he knows he wouldn’t be able to find anything of interest there, either.

“I didn’t think it was important enough to call about.”

A beat, and then she heaves a sigh, scrubs her hands over her face, and rolls over toward him, onto her side, propping her cheek on her fist. She reaches over with her other hand and runs her fingers roughly through his hair, as if she’s combing out all of her frustration with him. “It was important enough. But that’s fine, I don’t think it really matters now. If he’s been in the same city as you for five days, if he’s been keeping tabs on you and nothing has happened yet…” She doesn’t need to finish the sentence. He gets it.

He lets out the breath he’d been unwittingly holding. “Are you still worried about…” He trails off.

“About if it’s a honeypot? No. I mean, I don’t deal in certainties. But I think…”

“What?” he asks, after the pause stretches on for a whole minute.

“I think he’s gotten the vengeance out of his system. Or he’s done what he needs to do, at least for right now. He’s probably just trying to find his way back.” Back to what, she doesn’t say, but he feels the bloom of hope in his heart, like a water lily blossom, pushing up from the murky depths of the lake to open wide, fragrant petals on the surface, face turned toward the sun.

* * *

The next night, as they’re eating their sandwiches—meatball subs, and Steve has already dropped one meatball into his lap—Bucky says, with no warning, “Tell me what you see, when you open your eyes. When you wake up.”

Steve looks up at him, but there’s nothing on his face but curiosity. Immediately Steve starts second-guessing, trying to read between the lines to figure out what Bucky really wants. _Is he asking me about the layout of the house? Does he want to know what part I sleep in? Is he watching me?_

But Bucky seems to be able to read his mind, or perhaps he doesn’t need to because Steve’s every thought is finger-painted across his face in primary colors. “I’m just curious,” he says, and Steve is relieved to find that there’s no hurt on his face, just a long-suffering amusement with a tiny dollop of endearing shyness. “I just want to… to know. What your life is like. Now,” he finishes awkwardly.

Steve’s heart softens like a lump of warm beeswax in his chest and he nods.He gazes down at the tabletop for a thoughtful moment, imagining himself in his bed at home. “The ceiling, it’s finished in paneled wood with exposed beams. There’s one beam that runs down the center that always makes me think of a backbone, it makes me feel like the house is protecting me. Usually I wake up right as the sun is coming up, so I wouldn’t be able to see it very well ‘cause the room would still be pretty dark.”

“What else?”

Steve puts the end of his sandwich down and wipes his hands on the napkin so he can gesture without flinging the last meatball across the table. “Right next to my bed is my night table, with a lamp on it and the book I’m reading and my phone. On the other side of the lamp table is the railing for the stairwell that goes down to the second floor. If I looked a little further down”—he angles his hand out in front of him, as if he’s horizontal, looking down past his own feet—“I could see the corner where I’m going to put my easel, when I get one. But right now it’s just a big jumble of boxes and things.”

“What else?”

Steve strokes his hand down his chest, his heartbeat barely discernible through the broadcloth of his shirt. He thinks about lying in bed in the early-morning light, he thinks about turning his head to the side and seeing a lump under the covers, a shape still intimately familiar, though he hasn’t seen it for years. He swallows hard and briefly clenches his teeth and tries to will the thought away. “Well, there’s the blue-and-white quilt on the bed.” He watches Bucky as he says it, but again, Bucky makes no sign that he remembers. “I’m lying under it, if I haven’t kicked it off. It’s a flying goose pattern, a lot of little triangles running back and forth.”

Bucky wipes his own fingers and then his mouth; he’d finished his meatball sub ages ago, already. Then he puts his elbow on the table and tilts his head against his closed fist. “That sounds nice. Did you buy it at Ikea?”

“No, no,” Steve says. There’s a pain in his chest, a dull pain, but persistent, like a stone bruise. “It was ours.”

Bucky’s mouth opens on a quiet, “Oh,” his lips a ring of soft pink gleaming wetly in the sunlight that streams through the plate-glass window, the liquid gold of the late afternoon. He’s looking at Steve hungrily, but Steve doesn’t know what he wants, exactly. _Please don’t hold anything back,_ Steve hears in his memory. _I just want to know._

“Your ma made it for you, from scraps of lining fabrics she brought home from the hat shop. There was one for each of your sisters, too, but you were the oldest, so yours was finished first. You were supposed to use it on your bed when you got married.” Bucky’s eyes are so wide that Steve can see the whole ring of silvery blue around his pupils, nothing but inky dots in the bright sunlight.

“You’re supposed to give newlyweds a new quilt, you know, it’s tradition, and the first night they sleep under it, they make a wish. But then, when you moved in with me, she must have seen something, she must have known, I don’t know, because she wrapped it up all nice in paper, with a bow, and gave it to you the day you left home. We slept under it that first night in my apartment.”

“Did we make a wish?” Bucky’s voice is a velvet ribbon curling around Steve’s throat, and he has to cough into his hand, breaking the spell, before he can speak.

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

“That we’d be together forever. We both said it.”

Bucky closes his eyes. He seems to be able to read Steve like a book with no words, only pictures, but Steve still can’t get a hold on him, though he tries, as if he could read the foreign language of Bucky’s face by sheer force of will. “How’d you get it back?” Bucky says finally.

“Nat showed up at my apartment with it one day. I barely knew her, just that she was the Widow, and she was dangerous, and she was on my team. But we hadn’t fought together, yet. This was before the Battle for New York.” He looks down at his hands on the table and drums his fingers. His hands were one of the few things that the serum didn’t change, but even so, they look different in the dream. These are young hands, soft like white doves; they’d never held a shield or a gun or killed a man on the field of war. They’re carefree hands whose only preoccupations were drawing and feeding himself and touching Bucky in all the ways that satisfied them both.

“I had just moved to DC to work more closely with SHIELD, and I was just going through the motions, you know? I was Captain America twenty-four hours a day, even when nobody was watching, even when I was asleep. It was a scaffolding. The only way I could keep myself from falling apart. I don’t know how she knew that, though I guess it was her spy nature coming through. But she knocked on my door one day and barged right into my apartment and said, ‘I’ve got a present for you. It was in the Smithsonian, but I got it back.’”

“How’d she get it?”

Steve keeps looking down at his fingers, drumming on the table. He feels, somehow, that if Bucky can see his face only at an angle, he won’t be able to see how desperate he is, torn asunder by longing, or how close he is to tears. “I still don’t know. She won’t tell me, though I’ve bugged her enough. I don’t know if she asked for it, or threatened someone, or outright stole it. But she got it. She knew that I needed it, and she went and got it for me.”

“Thank her for me, will you?” Bucky sounds amused, but Steve still doesn’t look up. He’s barely holding himself together; he’s about to fly to pieces and his face feels like an overfilled water balloon.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah, I will.”

He watches as Bucky shifts in his seat, sits up straight, and then holds his hand out across the table. Steve doesn’t hesitate to take it, but then Bucky closes his hand around Steve’s wrist and tugs. “Come around here,” he says, trying to maneuver Steve out of the booth and into the aisle, as if he’d drag him out by the arm if he had to.

Steve’s incipient tears are forgotten in an instant. “Are… are we allowed to do that?” It feels like breaking the rules to even suggest it. He sits _here_ , Bucky sits _there_ , and that’s the way it is.

Bucky just snorts. “Come on, this is our dream, we can do whatever we want.”

Steve is still resisting, though he can’t really say why. Bucky’s not trying to force him, but the pull of his hand on Steve’s wrist is hard to resist, and Steve’s body is curved into an angular half-moon as he braces against it. “I couldn’t make that apple appear,” he says, but Bucky just rolls his eyes.

“This is just us changing things up a little. I think if you want a specific thing, you have to order it from Carole over there.”

Steve looks up toward the counter, but Carole Lombard is nowhere to be seen. Either there’s a back room or a kitchen or… or she just disappears when she’s not needed. Strange that he’s never thought about it before, but it suddenly occurs to him that there are a lot of things about this dream that he hasn’t given any thought to.

But Bucky is still tugging persistently, so he finally shrugs and gives in, slipping around to the other side of the booth, where he slides in until his knee is just touching Bucky’s, their hips still a hand’s-breadth apart. He finds, suddenly, that his heart is galloping like a racehorse and his hands are trembling. He crosses his arms and shoves his hands into his armpits, desperate to try and hide at least a little of what this sudden proximity is doing to him.

Bucky looks at him side-eyed and grins. “I’m not gonna bite you.”

“Wish you would,” Steve says, and then claps a hand over his own traitorous mouth.

But Bucky just laughs, long and loud, and reaches over with his right hand. He holds it between them, palm up, hovering over the cracked red vinyl seat, waiting.

All of a sudden, Steve is struck by how swiftly the tables have turned. He feels almost dizzy, as if the scuffed linoleum floor of the diner is a rug that’s just been pulled out from under his feet. He’s spent these last two months trying to coax Bucky like a skittish fawn out into the open, and yet here is Bucky with his solid, steady hand held out to Steve, instead.

He reaches over with his left hand and grasps Bucky’s right, lacing their fingers together, and it feels like a line has connected deep in the profoundest part of his gut. He feels shot through with a kind of nervous energy brushing up against raw power that thrums through his veins and pushes his heart into overdrive again. Bucky squeezes his hand tighter and tighter until Steve can see the tips of his fingers turn white.

Steve puffs a startled breath out between his lips and says, “Huh. You, uh…”

“Yeah.” Bucky says in the same tone of voice. “Me too.”

He scoots down the bench toward Steve until their legs are pressing together from knee to hip. His body feels so hot, like he’s on fire, like he was smelted in a furnace and has just been poured into a Bucky-shaped mold in the sand.

They sit like that until Carole Lombard comes over with the check. She lays it down on the table with a smile.

He wakes up

* * *

Sam arrives the next day at lunchtime with a moving van. He hadn’t actually gotten his transfer from the VA yet, but he’s still technically on his leave of absence, and he tells Steve that if it doesn’t come through, he’s just going to quit. What the Avengers Initiative is going to pay him will allow him to do volunteer work full-time, if he wants to, especially since he doesn’t have to spend money on rent. And besides, DC had been giving him the heebie jeebies; he couldn’t stop thinking about the helicarriers hovering over the Potomac, blotting out the sun. As soon as he’d known he was going to leave, he’d wanted to get the hell out of Dodge, as fast as possible.

They unload the moving truck and Steve carries everything up the stairs while Sam complains about “goddamn supersoldier showoffs” and pushes things around in the living room until he’s satisfied with the distribution.

He’d had much more to clean out of his kitchen than Steve, and it takes almost all evening to argue about which utensils go where and to put everything away. By the time they’re finished, they’re both too tired to think about cooking, so Steve orders Thai takeout and they pull Sam’s barstools up to the kitchen island and eat in companionable silence.

When he’s finished, Sam sits back with a contented sigh and laces his fingers together over his belly. “I haven’t really talked to you about anything but furniture and logistics since you dropped me off at my house, what’s been going on?” he asks.

Steve shrugs. “Not much, just moved to New York, bought a house, experienced Ikea for the first time.”

Sam blinks a few times. “Not much. Not much, he says.”

Steve laughs. “Come on, think about what my day job is. A week of nothing but sitting around the Tower and looking at real estate and buying furniture is practically a vacation. I’m very relaxed.” He makes a motion with his hand like a slow, rolling wave, but he’s not sure the meaning comes through.

“Man, you’ve got some weird priorities,” Sam says, looking skeptical.

“You’re about to join the Avengers, look who’s talking.”

“Yeah, but I’m not gonna let it take over my life.”

He sounds so smug and so sure of himself, that cocky grin with the endearing gap smack in the middle of it, and Steve finds himself as charmed as he is annoyed. “It didn’t take over my life!” he protests, but it’s automatic. Immediately after the words leave his mouth, he grimaces. “But only because I didn’t have a life to begin with, I guess.”

The cheeky set of Sam’s mouth softens. “You’ll get there,” he says, and Steve nods, looking down at his big hands on the table. They don’t look like soft white doves in the waking world; they look like big cast-iron hammer heads, heavy and scarred. Still, they’re the same hammer heads he’s always had, only the handles were replaced when they’d worn out—or, rather, when they’d been deemed too spindly for anyone’s good.

He looks up and past Sam, then, to the blank wall of the kitchen, to give himself a little room to think. A painting should go there, maybe. A clock? His ma always used to have a calendar hanging on a nail on the kitchen wall, but he doesn’t actually need one, anymore. His own self is a calendar, and each day he tears another page off, crumples it up, and throws it away.

“Are you still having the dream?” Sam asks, and Steve jolts back into reality.

“Oh, yeah. Same as before, every night, same diner.” He turns his hand over and looks at his palm. The calluses he’d developed from tossing the shield around are mostly gone. The skin at the crease of his fingers is a little darker and a little tougher when he runs his thumb over it, but the calluses are only a few weeks from disappearing completely. Suddenly, he wonders what it would be like to never get them back.

“And he’s just the same?”

Steve looks up. “I mean… no. He’s much more open,”—he thinks about Bucky pulling him around to his side of the booth, about holding hands, the electric jolt—"he’s been asking me a lot about our past, and about this house.”

“Do you think he’s going to show up here?” Sam doesn’t sound worried, which is reassuring.

“No? I don’t think so. At least not yet. I think he’s in New York, though.” Steve tells him the short version of what Bucky had said.

Sam does look a little concerned, now, his lips pursed into a straight line. “You gotta tell Nat.”

“I already did,” Steve grins. It’s nice to be one step ahead of _somebody_ for a change. “She was here the day before yesterday. Showed up in the middle of the night and took off right after breakfast.”

Sam’s mouth turns down at the corners into a genuine frown. If only his bottom lip would pudge out a little more, Steve could call it an actual pout. “Aw, man. I can’t believe I missed her.”

“Mm hmm?” Steve hums, a question he thinks he knows the answer to, and Sam gives him a look that straddles the line between uncomfortable recognition and murder.

“Shut up, Steve,” he mutters.

Steve laughs and looks down at his hand again, digging his thumb into the middle of his palm. He’s broken his fingers so many times fighting that it’s a wonder they don't look like a handful of crooked twigs. Does Bucky remember Steve’s hands the way he remembers the fights Steve’s hands got into? Does he remember saying, one night in the dark, the streetlamp making patterns on the wall as the curtains flapped in the breeze, that he felt like both the canvas and the paintbrush when Steve’s hands touched him?

“So,” Sam says, and even though his voice is hesitating, it slaps Steve out of his reverie again, “I was thinking about this on the drive up here. And maybe Nat suggested it already. And it sounds weird as shit, but it’s already an extremely weird situation. What if… what if the diner is a real place?”

Steve’s head jerks up, his eyes wide, to find Sam looking at him seriously. “Holy shit. No, I’ve never thought about that. But, if it is, I gotta find it. How am I gonna find it?”

“Well, what’s it called?” Sam asks.

“I don’t actually know.”

Sam’s frown gets deeper. He seems to have as many frowns as he does grins, each one of them its own unique expression. “Is there no name on the window?” Steve doesn’t actually remember looking at the window, but he doesn’t think so, for some reason. He shakes his head. “And what about the menu?”

“I’ve… I’ve never looked at the menu before.”

Sam narrows his eyes, and Steve says, “It’s still just a regular dream, even if the circumstances are strange. There are things I notice in vivid detail, like Bucky, but other things, I… I never notice. They’re hazy. I’ve never looked at the menu because I always knew what I wanted to order.”

Sam gives him a long, considering look, and then turns half away and starts gathering up their plates. “Maybe you should try tonight, see if there might be some clue.”

“Yeah. Okay, yeah,” Steve says, the nerves starting to roil in the pit of his stomach like a stepped-on ant hill.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and walks over to the booth, but when he moves to sit on his usual side, Bucky says, “No, here,” and scoots down toward the corner and the plate glass window, giving Steve plenty of room to slide in beside him.

Steve scoots in, hesitantly at first, and then when Bucky pats the vinyl beside his thigh, all the way over until they’re nearly pressed together. Steve can feel the heat of him immediately, leaking through the material of his clothes; he wonders when he’s going to start sweating. It’s like sitting next to the sun.

Bucky has his head resting on his fist, his elbow on the table, and he’s looking at Steve with a subtly happy smile on his face. They weren’t that far apart when they were sitting on opposite sides of the table, but up close, Steve can see so much more of him, his face grown larger-than-life in Steve’s field of vision. He pushes his forgotten glasses up his nose, glasses he doesn’t think he actually wears in the dream until they’re manifested by the unconscious tic of pushing them up to get a better view.

Bucky comes into focus, and Steve can see the cluster of freckles speckled across the bridge of his nose, the perfect cupid’s bow above his upper lip the exact size of the pad of Steve’s little finger, the faint suggestion of a beard, freshly shaved. At the very end of his plump chin, the hair grows more thickly; he’s clean-shaven, but his chin looks nearly scruffy, and Steve knows that if he reached out and ran the back of his knuckles over it, he’d feel the pleasant burn of the new stubble on his fingers.

His lips are red; they look freshly bitten. Was he biting them, waiting for Steve to arrive? Was he worried, was he afraid that Steve wouldn’t come? As he watches, the tip of Bucky’s tongue flicks out and draws his bottom lip into his mouth, from where it slides slowly back out, glistening in the low sunlight.

He can’t look at Bucky’s eyes—not yet.

But as the confusing mixture of apprehension and longing and pure, uncut desire roils in his stomach, he glances farther down and his eyes catch on the space where the button is missing. There’s a hole in the fabric of the placket where the thread had pulled through, a tiny monument to the inevitability of loss. A button, a moment in time, a hand, a life. He can’t tear his eyes away from the hole in the placket, even as Bucky’s white throat bobs as he swallows and the strong pulse of his heart quivers at the side of his neck. _It would be so easy to mend_ , he thinks _. A needle and thread_ … _but the button’s still missing—_

All this passes in half a moment, though when Bucky holds his left hand out between them, Steve has to squeeze his eyes shut for a moment to give himself time to change gears. Then he reaches over and takes the hand, lacing their fingers together. The line connects, the energy thrums, his heart goes into overdrive. But it’s less, this time, less overwhelming, more like a deep-water current than a storm disturbing the surface of the sea.

Carole Lombard appears beside the table with the menu, and he doesn’t wave it away, remembering what Sam had said. Bucky pulls their clasped hands close to his thigh and is looking down at them, seemingly lost in contemplation, or maybe just waiting for him to order. So Steve does what he could have done months ago, although he’s not sure what good it would have done him, then. He looks at the menu.

It's one stiff sheet folded in half, made of laminated cardstock an indistinct color between yellowed plastic and dirty cream. One of the corners is peeling up in a sharp curl, and the surface is tacky under his fingertips with the residue of grease and a thousand other hands. He narrows his eyes, pushes his at-will glasses up his nose, and tries to make out the picture on the front cover, but Bucky steals his attention away. “Do you know what you want?” he asks, his voice low like a lullaby, skating over Steve’s ear in a way that makes goosebumps race up his arms immediately.

He takes a deep breath and looks up at the other side of the booth, _his_ side of the booth, disconcerting in its emptiness. Bucky has leaned in so close that Steve can’t turn his head without colliding with him, and his heart is sprinting again in his chest like a greyhound when the gates open. _What is he doing?_ Steve thinks. If this were seven years ago,— _no,_ he reminds himself, _seventy years ago_ —but it’s not. It’s a dream, that’s all. A dream within a dream.

“Hotdogs, Buck,” he says, “with the works.” Bucky laughs, seemingly for no reason at all and Steve can feel the huff of hot air as it puffs across the skin of his neck. Bucky makes a noise in the back of his throat that sounds like agreement, and then sits back straight with another rumble of laughter and pulls their clasped hands into his lap.

Steve looks at the menu again. The picture on the front resolves itself into a hamburger, classic quarter-pounder with green lettuce, yellow cheese, and a red tomato between two sesame-speckled buns. An almost too-realistic illustration, like Norman Rockwell with the volume turned up. He opens the menu and peers at the left-hand page. There are two columns, dishes and their prices, he supposes. He catches a glimpse of _The Classic BLT: Crisp lettuce, applewood-smoked_ before his eyes skate away. He can’t get a visual grip on the words; it’s like trying to look at something frictionless which lets go of the light instead reflecting it back with purpose, and he pushes his glasses up his nose again.

Then, at the very top, he sees it, big letters printed in a bold, black sans-serif, the name:

The Good Morrow  


Est. 1945  


_Strange name_ , he thinks, but Carole Lombard appears before he can react. “Two hotdogs with the works,” he says, his distracted voice a wobbly line drawn with a pen that skips. She smiles and sweeps the menu out of his hands and disappears, though he can no longer watch her go; he’s facing the wrong way, down to the other end of the diner.

Then he finally turns back to Bucky, who is regarding him steadily, an enigmatic smile on his face. Steve’s right hand is grasped in his left and he’s pressing it up against his belly, soft and warm like fresh bread under the thick, scratchy wool of his shirt. _What are you doing_ , Steve wants to ask. _Don’t do this if you don’t mean it_ , he wants to say. _Don’t do this unless you’re going to come home,_ he thinks, desperately, and something must change in his face because Bucky squeezes his hand tighter and says, “Tell me more about us.”

“What do you want to know?”

Bucky shrugs, enigmatic again. “Anything,” he says. His voice is light and easy, but then Steve glances up from where he’s been watching Bucky’s mouth and finally catches his eye. He remembers, all of a sudden, Nat saying once, when she’d been telling scary stories one night on a mission and trying to get Steve to chicken out, that vampires can’t come inside unless you invite them. Bucky’s eyes are so hungry.

“Okay.” He taps his free forefinger on his bottom lip, thinking, trying to calm his nerves. “You grew a pot of chamomile on the fire escape, and whenever I needed calming down, you’d pinch off some fresh blossoms and make me a cup of tea.” _And sometimes you sat on me and threatened to pour it down my throat if I didn’t straighten up_ , he doesn’t say.

“Did it work?”

“Usually, but it wasn’t the chamomile that made it work,” he says, looking back down at Bucky’s mouth again. “It was the gesture.”

Bucky tucks his thumb in between their palms, fingers still laced together, and uses the blunt edge of his nail to trace Steve’s lifeline. “Tell me more,” he says, but then Carole Lombard appears with the hotdogs. Mustard, onions, relish, peppers; Steve knows he’s going to lose half his toppings the minute he picks it up. It doesn’t matter, though. He reluctantly pulls his hand out of Bucky’s and they set to it, elbows knocking, laughing around their mouthfuls. But even hot dogs with the works aren’t very big, and Steve is almost done with his in just a few minutes. Superstitiously, he doesn’t eat the last two bites, but sets the bun down on his plate. Perhaps the duration of their meal is what determines the duration of the dream, and he wants to give them as much time as possible, so he deliberately doesn’t finish.

Bucky wipes his hands and his mouth on the napkin, which he drops on his own empty plate, and then says, low but seriously, “Tell me more?”

Steve nods and swallows the lump of food in his mouth. What to choose? There are so many memories, some of them bad, most of them good, some so filthy he’s not even sure he can talk about them without bursting into flames.

“Um, when I got scarlet fever in our last year in high school and I was in quarantine and we couldn’t see each other for a month, you wrote me letters every day and slid them under my door. They were long, a couple pages front and back, of you talking about when we were grown up, and how we were going to live in a big house together and you’d have a good job in an office and buy a car and we were going to drive all the way out to the Grand Canyon.”

Bucky reaches over and Steve slips their hands together again as easily as if they’d been practicing the gesture for a hundred years. “You were going to take care of me so I didn’t get sick anymore, and I would draw for Action Comics while you were at work all day, and we’d be able to go to the pictures every weekend because there’d be enough money, and we were going to be best friends forever. I was already in love with you at that point, and you with me, though it was another two years before we figured it out.”

Bucky leans into him, pressing their shoulders hard together like they’re two stones wedged at the top of an arch. Then he takes his right arm, their hands still laced together, and passes it over Steve’s head, cinching his elbow tight around Steve’s shoulder. The knot of their hands is resting over Steve’s heart, and he wonders if Bucky can feel the way it’s beating now, strong but erratic, an irregular beat that makes his ears ring.

“This okay?” Bucky murmurs hesitantly, and by way of answer, Steve pushes into his ribs, as close as he can get when they’re still sitting side by side. He’s so warm and he smells like something delicious that Steve can’t put his finger on. The subtle scent of him is like a perfume distilled from the essence of a gingersnap and an old leather jacket, the inside of a florist’s shop, freshly-pressed cotton, and the clean mineral smell of a stream high up in the mountains. He closes his eyes for a minute, unspeakably lulled, wondering idly if he’s about to fall asleep inside his own dream.

But then Bucky says, “Tell me more?”

Without opening his eyes, Steve says, “Why are you doing this?” It just slips out of him, his mind half-asleep, a recursive drowsiness that makes his inhibitions melt like ice cream in the sun.

Bucky freezes; Steve can feel the way he turns to granite against his side, and he starts to sit up straight, but Bucky’s left arm is an iron band around his shoulder, holding him in place. “What do you mean?” Bucky finally asks, his voice steady but thin, reedy with worry or fear or something else.

“I mean… look, I want to tell you these things.” Steve drums the fingers of his free hand on his knee, trying to think. But the tactical part of his mind has disappeared, or perhaps it was never in the dream to begin with. “I want you to know. I want to hold your hand, I want you to, to touch me. But not… not just here, in the diner. Look…” he says again. There’s a lump in his throat that feels like a tulip bulb, thick and papery and impossible to swallow around.

“What?”

_Deep breath_. “I told you I loved you. That I still love you. Remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Bucky says, and his voice turns indignant, and that’s exactly what Steve needs to give him the stones to push through.

“I’m sorry if this is the wrong thing to say, but I have to be explicit. It’s not just that I love you, I’m still _in_ love with you. I long for you.” He closes his eyes, but all he can see is the afterimage of Bucky’s hungry eyes, six inches away, incredibly close and impossibly far. “All I want is to see your face again in the waking world. If we didn’t have this weird dreamsharing thing going on, I’d still be dreaming about you every night. I miss you so much,” he ends on a whisper.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t move away, either. His left hand moves hesitantly across his lap and he presses the tips of his fingers into Steve’s hip, right above his belt. Steve doesn’t know what it means— perhaps a gesture of comfort, giving or taking. His left hand stays laced with Steve’s, over his heart.

“I just need a little bit more time,” Bucky says finally, after a long minute passes very slowly. “Not much.”

“You can have as much time as you want,” Steve says evenly, but his heart is dancing in his chest. He couldn’t have asked for a better answer, not unless it was, _I love you, too, and I’m going to show up on your doorstep tomorrow_.

“Thank you,” Bucky whispers. Another long moment passes, but Steve relishes it, weak as he is with relief and something giddy and sharp like an acid twist of lime. Then Bucky clears his throat. “Um, Carole Lombard hasn’t come with the check, yet, tell me something else?”

But as if summoned, Carole Lombard appears from behind them. She lays the check facedown on the table with a smile.

He wakes up.


	11. Chapter 11

That next day, and for a whole week afterward, he can’t bring himself to look for the diner. It’s too… what if it exists and finding it is the thing that breaks the spell? What if it doesn’t actually exist at all, what then? He feels caught in a limbo; every night he pushes through the glass door of Schrödinger’s diner and eats a sandwich with a very real Bucky, but when he opens his eyes in the morning, the uncertainty comes flooding back again.

Sam gets settled in, they draw up a cleaning schedule, he takes a look at the backyard and says, “At the very least, we need a grill.” They buy a grill and, since Nat has dropped back off the face of the earth, they invite Tony over for dinner. Steve expects him to show up driving a Ferrari in a $10,000 suit, but he’s dropped off at the door in a nondescript sedan wearing ripped jeans and a Metallica t-shirt that looks like it’s seen the backrooms of at least three different thrift stores. He needles them incessantly about living in Brooklyn, but after he leaves, drunk as a skunk on six margaritas, Steve and Sam both agree that it was fun, and maybe they should invite him again.

Every night Steve climbs the stairs up to the attic and strips off his clothes and crawls into bed underneath the blue-and-white quilt and then pushes through to the other side, bells jingling above the door, meeting Carole Lombard’s eye with a smile. Every night Bucky is waiting for him, and he slides over to make room as soon as Steve approaches. Every night he slings his arm around Steve and draws him in close, Steve’s skinny shoulder wedged up under Bucky’s armpit, their heads tucked together as they talk.

_Tell me about us_ , he says. _Tell me more._

So Steve tells him about the summer when he was eight and Bucky was nine and they decided to run away together because Bucky’s ma had just had another baby and he had hadit up to _here_ with all these babies in the house. The only thing they did was cry, and he wasn’t allowed to make any noise _at all_ , and all anyone ever did was talk about the baby! So he told Steve to pack some clothes and meet him on the street right after lunch, when they were allowed to roam free and therefore wouldn’t be missed until dinner.

But Sarah caught Steve packing his suitcase and took one look at the pile of comics and the two pairs of clean underwear and sniffed him out immediately. She went into the kitchen and made him two generous ham and cheese sandwiches with lots of mustard and a sliced tomato, just the way he liked it. She wrapped them in paper, and when she gave them to him, she said, with a sad sigh, “I know you have your reasons. But I’ll be awfully lonely without you darling, and I’ll miss you ever so much.” Then she kissed him on the cheek and said, “Take care of yourself, write me when you can, I love you,” and slipped on her shoes and left for her shift at the hospital.

They’d gotten as far as the corner of the park before Steve sat down on the curb and burst into a hysterical flood of tears. When Sarah got home from work that evening, they were sitting at the kitchen table drawing, and she had given each of them a kiss and said, very seriously, “Bucky, would you like to run away to our house for a while? I don’t think your mother would mind so much.” He stayed for two whole weeks, and it’s still one of the highlights of Steve’s life.

_Tell me more._

Bucky knew how to knit—his ma had taught him when he was small—and when he and Steve lived together, he had made most of Steve’s warm clothes, his sweaters and scarves and mittens and hats. He also had a perpetual project, a scarf made of all the bits of wool left over from other projects and scraps scrounged from things that had grown too holey to bother mending anymore. It lived in the knitting basket beside the armchair, the one with three legs and a stack of pulps in place of the fourth, and over the years it grew and grew until it was nearly as tall as Steve. And yet, Bucky kept saying that it wasn’t finished yet; there was always another bit of yarn left to add. Steve didn’t know if Bucky was amused by the thought of wrapping him up in a scarf so long that he’d disappear beneath it, or if…

“If what?” Bucky asks. Their half-eaten sandwiches are forgotten on their plates and Steve is turned on the bench so that his left leg is hiked up, his knobby knee resting on Bucky’s thigh.

“I don’t know. I had the feeling, though I never said it out loud, that you were keeping something at bay. If the scarf was never finished, then something you were afraid of would never come to pass.”

“Like Penelope at her loom,” Bucky says, after a moment.

(He’d read, he told Steve, the _Odyssey_ , “at the very beginning, ‘cause I found it somewhere.” As much as Steve had wanted to pry, he didn’t; it’s one of the very few tidbits of information that Bucky has dropped about himself, and he cherishes it. And when he thinks about the Winter Soldier, angry and confused, reading, “Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost,” it kindles a tender fire in his chest that nearly scorches him with how hot it burns.)

“That makes me Odysseus, I guess.” Steve laughs under his breath, but Bucky looks at him seriously.

“Maybe, maybe then. But not anymore. I’m the one on my way back from the war. You’re the one who’s waiting.” He takes Steve’s hand in his own and squeezes the knuckle of his long middle finger. “Weaving and unweaving each night like a little spider.”

_Tell me more._

“When we… we got together because we had a fight one day,”—“Of course,” Bucky says under his breath, and Steve elbows him lightly in the ribs—"and I accidentally told you that I loved you in order to win the fight.” Steve can feel Bucky’s thick chest shaking with laughter, but he finds that he’s somehow laid his head down on Bucky’s shoulder without even thinking about it, and he doesn’t want to move, not even to glare.

“Anyway,” he goes on, “the next day you showed up on my doorstep with a beat-up old valise full of clothes and three milk crates full of books. Now, I knew you loved to read, but I had no idea you actually owned so many, I thought you got all your books out of the library just like I did. But it turned out that you and Becca had been pooling your money for years to buy science fiction pulps, but Becca was sweet on her English teacher and had decided that she wasn’t going to read pulps anymore. It was only serious literature for her, so you got to take the whole collection with you when you left.”

Steve’s apartment was so tiny that the influx of books made it smell like sour wood pulp and friable paper for ages, until they’d gotten them arranged in milk crates and stashed under the bed and stacked under the three-legged armchair and the dust settled. Steve still can’t go into a used bookstore today without thinking about Bucky and those three boxes of books, but he doesn’t say that part out loud.

_Tell me more._

“Do you…” He trails off.

“Spit it out,” Bucky says, his voice amused, almost a purr in Steve’s ear.

“You want to hear about the first time we… had sex? For real?” Steve asks hesitatingly, dropping his voice to a whisper even though there’s no one to hear him but Bucky. This is a line they haven’t crossed yet. Being together, living together, sleeping in the same bed, those are all details that Steve has woven into the stories he’s been telling Bucky, yes, but the actual realities of sexual desire and consummation and the hot, sweaty rush of it all, no.

But each night, he sits beside Bucky and touches the warm, smooth skin of the palm of his hand and smells the indefinable mixture of sea salt and lanolin and sweet hay and apple peelings or whatever it is that emanates from him that Steve can almost but not quite put his finger on, some secret ambergris.

And every morning, now, he wakes up hard and thinks about Bucky as he jerks off, the smell of his body on the old cotton sheets in the morning, the sounds he made when Steve fisted a hand in his hair and gave it a tug, the taste of his come, bitter but clean, like good medicine. He wants to say more, he wants to tell Bucky everything he thinks in the secret hours of the morning when no one is awake but Steve, and not even the sun has peeked over the horizon yet. But he doesn’t want to come on too strong, not quite yet.

Bucky takes a deep breath, like he’s going to say something important, but in the end, he just lets it back out again in a long, gusty whoosh and says, “Yeah.” He looks down at the half-eaten Reuben in his hand and then glances shyly back up at Steve. “Yeah, okay.” His cheeks are turning a lovely shade of petal pink. “Please.”

So Steve tells him how they had been so young, only nineteen and twenty, when they’d first moved in together. And it wasn’t that they were inexperienced—Bucky had slept with more girls than he could count on two hands and Steve had been the recipient of a few fumbled handjobs in grimy back alleys behind disreputable bars—but Bucky felt the responsibility of love like a heavy hand on the back of his neck.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he’d say.

“Then let me hurt you, instead,” Steve would counter.

“But what about your asthma,” Bucky would continue, and round and round it went until Steve finally gave up on wheedling, and they stuck to mouths and fingers and the tight clench of each other’s thighs as they took turns thrusting into that hot, narrow, miraculous space from behind, and it was good.

But then, that winter, Steve got sick, like he always did. It was just a bad cold with the accompanying fever and chills and floods of mucus; it wasn’t really that much different from other bad colds he’d had in the past. The only real difference was that Bucky had to play nurse now, whereas in the past, he’d only ever been the substitute of an evening while Sarah was at work.

He’d never had to deal with Steve waking up in the middle of the night delirious because of his high fever, or how he coughed so much he vomited all over the bedclothes, or the way, in the morning, after a night of inactivity, the phlegm had thickened so that it rattled in his chest like a death watch beetle every time he took a breath.

Bucky was scared out of his mind. He’d wanted to call the doctor, no matter how much Steve swore up and down that it was just the same thing that happened to him every year, and there was no use spending the money on a doctor’s bill.

But finally, Bucky had pleaded and threatened enough that Steve agreed, but on one condition.

“It was… I was really manipulative, it wasn’t nice of me to—” he says hesitatingly in the dream world.

But Bucky interrupts, “Would you get on with it?” and drums his fingers lightly on Steve’s side where he’s got his arm around him, tickling him so that he squirms away and further under the solid hinge of Bucky’s shoulder. “I thought this story was gonna be good.”

“Alright, okay. I said that you could call the doctor but that you had to let me fuck you properly when I got better.”

Bucky laughs out loud and pinches the thin skin over Steve’s ribs lightly, affectionately, and says, “I guess that was pretty evil. But I forgive you.” Steve almost says that he’s already been forgiven, many, many times over, but he doesn’t; it gives him a soft, hot-wax feeling to hear the old sentiment repeated anew.

The doctor had only spent a few minutes checking Steve over before he came to the obvious conclusion that it was just a bad cold, and then he’d collected his fee and gone back out the door without further ado. Bucky was left standing in the middle of the room looking so sheepish that Steve would have burst out laughing if it wouldn’t have killed his lungs.

“You’re an easy man to bargain with, Barnes,” he’d said, and Bucky had said, “Shut up” in that mild way he had that meant, _I love you more than I can possibly say_.

Steve bided his time, and it was months later, nearly Christmas, when he finally made his move. He’d worked a short shift at the greengrocer’s in the morning and had been sitting at the kitchen table all afternoon, working on a lettering commission. He heard Bucky coming up the staircase, the familiar light tread that was as recognizable to Steve as the beating of his own heart, so he had been waiting in front of the door, ready to attack as soon as Bucky had slipped his winter coat off. He immediately pushed into Bucky’s space, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the plackets up to hide his face so that he could press his cheek into the soft-hard muscle of Bucky’s broad chest. He smelled like sweat and wilted cotton and the wool of his winter coat, with a faint note of lavender from the soap he’d used to wash up that morning.

Bucky’s voice rumbled up through the acoustic chamber of his rib cage, and Steve felt it through his temple more than he heard it through his ear—it was the bad one, anyway, stuck out into the cold air of the little apartment, poor thing. “Nice to see you too, pal,” he said with a happy little laugh. Then he pushed Steve back by the shoulders and kissed him sweetly on the mouth. “What’s all this for?”

“I’m calling in that promise.”

“What promise?” Bucky said, after a pause, but by the change in the timbre of his voice, Steve knew that he knew.

Steve took a step back. “Why don’t you go get washed up,” he suggested offhandedly. And then he went back to his work at the kitchen table, leaving Bucky standing in the doorway with his shirt half-unbuttoned and a staggered look on his face. Steve let him stew for half a minute before he cleared his throat, not looking up. There was a whispered, “Fuck,” and then Bucky picked up the little bag with their washcloth and soap and slipped back out the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

When he came back, Steve bossed him out of his clothes and onto the bed on his back. He’d touched Bucky before, of course, had even put a finger in him, he knew how much Bucky liked it, how his breath hitched when he traced a nail round his twitching rim. But it was an entirely different thing to watch his face, turned to the side and half suffocated in the pillow, when Steve pushed his cock in, how beads of sweat stood out all over his body, even in the still, cold December air in their apartment, how his throat bobbed under the flushed skin of his long neck as he gasped again and again in high-pitched little cries—

He closes his eyes in the dream, Bucky’s face even in his peripheral vision like a lump of white phosphorus on fire with the telling of it.

Steve himself feels scalded by the memory of watching his cock slip inside Bucky’s burning body, how he’d thought there was no way he’d be able to fit in there, and then, miraculously, he did, moving in short little thrusts until he’d completely disappeared, nothing but the narrow jut of his hips against the smooth backs of Bucky’s thighs to show were they were joined together.

It would have been easier from behind, or so Bucky had argued, but Steve wanted to see his face, to know exactly what it was that he was doing to him. There was no glory in fucking someone if you couldn’t see the way they fell apart, he’d shot back, and Bucky had muttered, “Glory, huh?” but the look on his face said that Steve had already won. He was so easy, was Bucky, so hot for it. It made Steve feel like he was seven feet tall, like he was drunk on brandy, sweet and heavy.

It was dark in the apartment, but a little bit of lamplight came in through the muslin curtains over the window, and Steve could see clearly how red Bucky’s face was, how his chest heaved with each breath. He would gasp, hold his breath for a long moment, and then let it out in a gust and a breathy little whine, and something about how unsophisticated and slovenly it all was made Steve wanted to smack him, just to see the way Bucky’s skin would red up under his hand. But that was for another day; right now he had to concentrate on not losing his way on the hot, twisted path to orgasm.

He rested his hands on either side of Bucky’s waist, normally solid but made so narrow by the arch of his back and the way his chest barreled out with each heaving breath. “Are you okay?” he whispered, not daring to move any further.

Bucky didn’t open his eyes, his face still half-hidden in the pillow, but he brought one of his hands down and clutched at Steve’s skinny wrist. “Yeah, yeah. It’s strange. But… feels good. Feel better in a minute.”

Steve rocked back and forth a little, barely pulling out at all before pushing back in, and Bucky tossed his sweaty head back and forth on the pillow mumbling, “Yeah, yeah, like that, yeah, Steve.” It didn’t seem but two minutes before Steve was right on the verge of coming, so he reached one of his hands down and gathered up some of the excess lubricant dripping round the rim of Bucky’s hole, at which Bucky produced a choked squeal bitten off into the pillow clutched over his face.

Then Steve saw, rather than felt his orgasm approaching, passing the point of no return and barreling forward, blinding and inevitable. Quickly he moved his hand up and grasped weakly at Bucky’s cock, hitherto ignored, and started to jerk him off sloppily, only somewhat in time with his own small thrusts. He came all in a rush that felt like taking a blow to the head, stars exploding across the backs of his tightly-shut eyelids. Not a moment later he felt Bucky tense up like a bowstring drawn back by the arrow shaft, his come splashing wet on his belly, his throat full of one half-articulated _Steve._

There’s a moment of silence between them while the unlife of the diner goes on around their little islet of a booth. Steve still has his eyes closed, the image of Bucky’s pale body stretched underneath him on the blue-and-white quilt burnt into his retinas like the sun’s bright corona. He’s acutely aware of Bucky breathing beside him, too-deep breaths through his nose, as if he’s trying to get himself under control. “Fuck,” Bucky mutters, and then laughs under his breath, but before Steve can say anything, Carole Lombard, that inconvenient cupid, interrupts them.

They spring apart like two dogs caught scrounging in the garbage bin, and Steve doesn’t even have time to look over at Bucky, to see what his face looks like, before she lays down the check with a smile. He can imagine it, though; it must look exactly as flushed and debauched as his own.

He wakes up.

* * *

When he opens his eyes, he finds his own hand has anticipated him; it’s already shoved down the front of his boxers, squeezing the damp head of his cock almost painfully. He moans, and then claps his other hand across his mouth—he’d forgotten for a second that Sam lives here, now. It’s early, though, the room still dark, and Sam won’t get up for another few hours. Still, even with two closed doors between them, he can’t bring himself to make noises like he normally would.

He pulls his hand out of his shorts—where’s the lube? In a box, doesn’t matter, he’s not going to last very long—and spits into his palm, then pulls the elastic of his boxers down and tucks it under his balls.

He’s older now, and he’s got the serum, which gives him a stamina that a 19-year-old kid fucking for the first time could never have dreamed of. He lasts longer than even the vividity of the dream, though not as long as he could—he’s been teetering on the edge since he blinked awake. His mind casts about for some part of the memory to replay, when all of a sudden it occurs to him that maybe Bucky’s doing the same thing right now; in whatever bed he’s found in New York, he might have his own hand on his own cock, jerking off at the same time.

It’s all he needs; he comes with a silent groan, all his muscles tightening up with the electrocution of pleasure.

When he finally gets out of bed, he feels light on his feet but sloppy, a part of him still knocked cockeyed by the force of his orgasm and the dream still fuzzily playing on his mind, the deliciously illicit thrill of sitting in a place that his subconscious registers as public and whispering to Bucky the way it felt to push the head of his cock inside him, the impossible, burning-hot fit, like fucking into the very center of the Earth itself.

The room is dark, though a glance through the window shows a haze of pink over the roofs of the houses behind. He digs around in his laundry basket for a dirty shirt to wipe himself off with, and then pulls a clean one out of the dresser to slip on over his bare chest. He goes down the stairs, avoiding all the boards that creak—he’s learned the house’s anatomy in the last week—and gropes for the light in the hood over the stove.

At this time of the morning, the overhead fluorescents would be like an unexpected slap in the face, and even though the little bulb over the stove hardly sheds any light at all, he doesn’t need it. He can see in the dark nearly as well as a cat, and he could make his coffee with nothing but the faintest lumen of starshine that comes in through the window. But a forty-watt bulb in the dark of the early morning can be more comfort than a hundred birthday candles on a bright summer’s day, so he flips the switch on the range hood and then pulls the coffee canister out of its place in the cabinet.

Sam comes down an hour or so later to find Steve sitting at the island reading _Guards! Guards!_ “I pulled this off your shelf, sorry,” he says, but Sam just waves his hand and gives him a half-asleep smile and goes to pour himself his own cup of coffee.

“What d’you have going on today?” he mumbles, sliding onto the stool opposite Steve.

“I… I found the name of the diner,” Steve says. He wasn’t actually sure he was going to say it, but his mouth just up and does it for him, anyway. Now the cat’s out of the bag, and Sam perks up immediately.

“Oh yeah? I mean, I thought you’d have figured it out days ago, why’d it take so long?”

“I did have it figured out days ago. The night after we talked about it, actually. But I didn’t… I couldn’t…” He looks down at the dregs of coffee in the bottom of his cup. He could get up and pour himself another one, but he doesn’t really need it. Caffeine doesn’t affect him, and coffee itself is nothing but a warm comfort he drinks out of habit.

Sam eventually finishes the sentence hanging in the air. “You can’t bring yourself to google it.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Steve says, relieved. “I don’t even know what to expect, whether it would be better to find that it actually exists, or that it doesn’t.”

Sam takes a long pull of his coffee and looks thoughtful. “Do you want me to look for you?” he asks. “I mean, the results will be the same, but sometimes it’s easier if you don’t have to look yourself. Like spoiling a scary movie.”

Steve hadn’t thought about it like that, but it’s perfect, actually. Of course Sam would cut right through the cobwebs to find the solution. “Yeah, okay. That would be nice.”

“Wait a sec,” Sam says, and goes into the living room to retrieve his laptop from the coffee table. “So what’s it called?” he asks, back at the island, booting it up.

“The Good Morrow.” Steve frowns, it still sounds like such a strange name to him.

But then Sam says, “Oh, like the Donne poem, that’s nice.”

“What?”

“John Donne, famous metaphysical poet? Ask not for whom the bell tolls and no man is an island and all that stuff?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “I mean, I know who John Donne is, but I don’t know much about what he wrote. How do _you_ know?”

“I majored in psychology, but I minored in poetry,” Sam says smugly.

“I… did not know that.” He’s realizing there’s still a lot about Sam he doesn’t know. Steve has fought with him and driven halfway across the country with him and cried on his shoulder and now they meet for breakfast in the kitchen every morning. But still, he’s like a trompe l’oeil in reverse—when you get up close to him, it turns out that what you’d so cleverly thought you’d pinned down as a painting is really a balcony overlooking a garden, roses climbing up the open shutters.

“I mean,” Sam goes on, “I don’t remember the whole poem, just the beginning, ‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did, till we loved?’”—he has a beautiful voice for poetry, smooth and tenor-deep, not at all New York nasally like Steve’s, although he grew up right on the other side of the East River—"and then there’s the middle bit,” Sam continues, “that I always loved, it goes, ‘And now good-morrow to our waking souls, which watch not one another out of fear; for love, all love of other sights controls, and makes one little room an everywhere.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and then he bursts into tears.

Sam swivels around on his stool and grabs the paper towels that are sitting on the counter, tearing one off the roll and sliding it across the island. Steve cries silently into the palms of his hands for another minute before he straightens up and blows his nose, while Sam busies himself putting on another pot of coffee, giving Steve some space without actually leaving him alone.

Finally, Steve screws up the damp paper towel in his fist and opens his mouth to say that he’s ready, or that he’s sorry, or something, but Sam beats him to the punch. “Why don’t you go take a shower? I’ll do a little research and let you know what I find out when you come back down.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve agrees, without even thinking about it. He slips off his stool and moves toward the door, but Sam says, “Wait, you want a hug before you go?” He’s a little shorter than Steve, but it doesn’t matter; his presence is so big that when Steve closes his eyes, he can almost pretend that he’s small again, wrapped up tight in the personification of the warmest day in June.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and walks over to the booth, where Bucky is waiting for him, slouched insouciantly in the corner.

Steve had been worried that they’d overstepped some kind of boundary; clearly there was a line, and clearly, they’d skipped happily over it like Hansel and Gretel on their way to the witch’s house, but he was determined not to feel weird about it if Bucky didn’t.

And from the look on his face as he sits in the corner with his legs spread and his knee cocked on the seat, he doesn’t, not even a little bit. He looks like a jaguar lying spread over a low tree branch, louche and almost voluptuous, waiting for some small, unsuspecting blond to stroll by so that he can drop down unannounced and sink his jaguar teeth into soft, willing flesh. Steve grins at him knowingly, and Bucky grins back.

“You look happy to see me,” he says as Steve slides down the bench and pushes into his side.

“I’m always happy to see you,” Steve murmurs. His eyes close almost involuntarily as the heat of Bucky’s too-hot body seeps through his shirt and into his ribs. He feels like a cat curling up in a bright square of sunshine falling in a big, solid block on the floor. He’s not sleepy, but he’s tired, some tedious exhaustion that goes deeper than can be fixed by shutting his eyes in bed for a few hours, and he wishes they could just sit like this for a bit while he lets his mind dissolve into an uncomplicated mist.

Bucky has his arm draped over Steve’s shoulder, drumming his fingers against Steve’s bicep, but then he stops and squeezes the muscle lightly. _My little spaghetti noodle,_ Steve thinks dizzily. “Are you falling asleep? While asleep?” Bucky pulls his arm back and then grasps Steve by the shoulders, pushing him away and turning him around so that he can look into Steve’s face. “Are you okay? Don’t try to tell me you’re not sleeping enough, what’s the matter?”

“I’m just tired,” Steve says, and he doesn’t yawn, but it’s a near thing.

Bucky narrows his eyes. “Tired of what?” he asks, and then pulls Steve back under his arm. There’s a touch of snark, an implied _you don’t do enough to tire you out_. Steve wonders again where he is, if he’s close by, how much he knows about Steve’s life, how much humid early-summer air is separating their two bodies right this very second while their dream bodies are pressed so close together, they could pass for one person in silhouette.

“Just tired,” Steve repeats. “I don’t exactly want to go back into the ice, but another decade or two of unconsciousness doesn’t sound so bad, sometimes.”

Bucky opens his mouth, but Carole Lombard appears by the table with the menu, and he snaps it shut again. Steve springs away from him a little, feeling somehow the leftover embarrassment from last night coloring his cheeks. “Uhh,” he says, running down the list he’d memorized. What haven’t they tried yet? “Um, yeah, two French dip sandwiches, please. Thank you.”

When Carole Lombard disappears behind the back of the booth again, Bucky tentatively slides his hand over the short space of vinyl that separates them and nudges Steve’s thigh with his fingers. “Are you tired of having this dream every night?” he asks, his voice neutral but hiding something behind it. Steve turns back toward him, but his eyes are downcast, looking at his hand spread between them, all of his sensual jaguar bravado forgotten.

Steve grabs Bucky’s hand in his own, lacing their fingers together, and says, “No, christ. I… I love this dream. I need it. If… if I went to sleep some night and dreamed of something else and you weren’t there, I’d… I don’t know what I’d do.” He looks up to see Bucky nodding, still looking at their hands clasped between them.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. Steve reaches over and covers the back of Bucky’s hand with his other palm. His fingers are long and elegant, but his big knuckles sit under the thin skin like a chain of mountain peaks, Steve’s slimmer fingers fitting neatly in the valleys between. They sit in silence for a few minutes, each of them looking at the knot of their hands between them. Steve wonders what Bucky is thinking, but he feels like they still haven’t reached the point of familiarity where he can ask. Not quite yet.

Eventually, he says, “I don’t know how long this is going to go on for, though.”

Bucky glances up at him, expression inscrutable. “Why can’t it go on forever?”

Steve snorts. “You seem to think we have any control over it.”

Carole Lombard appears at that moment with their sandwiches, juicy roast beef and melted swiss and loops of browned onions with a little cup of au jus and Bucky makes a noise beside Steve that sounds like a man reluctantly giving himself up to the pleasures of sin. Steve turns his head and fixes him with a look and Bucky does not, to his credit, actually blush, but the wattage of his face kicks up a notch.

“What,” he says flatly, “you think I wouldn’t come here for lunch every day if I could?”

“If only it were real.” Steve picks up one half of his sandwich and dips the end in the au jus. It runs out the corner of his mouth when he takes a bite and he has to wipe his face with the napkin.

“It’s real enough,” Bucky says before he takes a huge bite of his own sandwich and then makes the same reluctant-giving-into-pleasure noise again.

Steve’s heart lurches painfully in his chest. _What’s that supposed to mean?_ he thinks, gritting his teeth against the ache, not wanting to show what he’s feeling on his face. “So, you… you think this will last forever?” he says, mouth full of half-chewed food, hoping that will disguise the unevenness of his voice.

“Nothing lasts forever, Steve. But I think it’ll last as long as we don’t see each other in the waking world, yes. I guess that’s my theory.”

Steve’s feels another wave of exhaustion sweep over him, his heart a withered thing like an old avocado, rough and fractured skin clutching an intractable stone. “And what if we do?” he asks, trying to keep his voice even and light.

Bucky doesn’t say anything for a long minute. Steve wonders if he’s going to try to change the subject or just stop talking altogether. But then he says, “I don’t know what you’re expecting. I don’t know what you want.” He takes another bite of his sandwich, avoiding Steve’s eye.

“I told you before, I want you to be safe and healthy and happy. If you… if you need to stay away from me forever in order for that to happen, that’s… that’s fine.” He can feel the tears welling up and turns his face away to hide them, pinching the bridge of his nose to try and stave them off.

There’s the sound of Bucky wiping his fingers off on the napkin, and then his hand is at Steve’s elbow, squeezing the scanty muscle of his forearm. “Don’t lie to me, Steve.”

Steve still doesn’t turn around to look at Bucky. “You’re right. Okay. It’s not fine. I want to see you. I want to be with you in any way, at all. I mean that. If you wanted to meet for coffee for fifteen minutes once a week, I’d go gladly, I’d be happy to have that. But if you wanted… if you wanted more, you could have more.”

There’s another long pause while he looks down the edge of the table. He runs his forefinger down the ridged tin border and the pad of his finger catches on the seam where the edging overlaps itself, but it doesn’t cut him. He wonders idly if he’d bleed in the dream. Bucky had pinched himself that one time until the blood bloomed purple under his delicate skin, would a cut bleed red into the still diner air?

“More… like what?” Bucky asks finally. Tentative, his voice sounds almost translucent, a piece of muslin covering a big, open window, hiding the intimate tableau of indoor life, but letting the light through.

“I have a big house, you know,” Steve says. He turns back toward Bucky, but doesn’t look at him, keeps running his finger back and forth across the table edge. “There’s a spare bedroom. You could come stay with me.”

“And then what would happen? What would happen next?”

It’s not a yes, it’s not, _I’ll see you tomorrow_ , but he feels like a Christmas cracker being pulled apart in two directions at once, caught between trepidation and joy. “Well, whatever you want.” He glances up, but Bucky is watching his finger slide back and forth across the scuffed tin, mesmerized.

“Um…” He doesn’t really know what to say. “I’m, I’m working with the Avengers Initiative, and Sam is, too, but there isn’t much for us to do at the moment, so we have a lot of free time. There’s work to do on the house. Things need painting, replacing. The backyard isn’t very big, but it needs to be taken in hand or it’s going to turn into a jungle real soon. Uh…” He casts about for something else.

He’s been so focused on finding Bucky, on getting Bucky, on making a life that Bucky would feel comfortable stepping into like a pair of shoes they both share. He’s been so preoccupied that he hasn’t actually thought about the future in any real capacity, not beyond the exigencies of work, such as they are, and the fact that it’s almost July. “My birthday is coming up next week,” he says in wonder. He’d completely forgotten. “Don’t know what I’ll do about that, celebrate it in some way I guess, but if you wanted…” He trails off and looks up at Bucky again. Bucky’s eyes are back on his face, his gaze inscrutable. His hand is still clutching Steve’s forearm, as if he’d completely forgotten it was there.

“I meant...” Bucky hesitates, then lets go of Steve’s elbow and grabs his hand from off the table, instead. He laces their fingers together and then waves the clamshell of their hands in the space between them. “I meant, what is this? What do we do about this?”

“Oh,” Steve says. His heart flutters in his chest; it’s been getting the kind of workout lately that he usually has to destroy a punching bag for. “Well, for me, exactly what I said before. I want to be with you, in any way at all. If you want me in dribs and drabs, I’m yours. If you wanted to be friends, well, I mean, we’re already friends.” He strokes Bucky’s thumb with his own, the skin warm and soft, the nearly-invisible scars of childhood as familiar on Bucky’s hands as the ones on his own. “If you wanted us to be more… you could have more, too.” He glances up at Bucky, who is watching his mouth intently, and hardly seems to register what Steve is saying.

“Oh,” Bucky echoes after a long moment, and then his eyes flick up to meet Steve’s. Another long moment passes, one in which Steve feels himself growing older, or perhaps younger; at any rate, he’s passing through time, somehow, leaving a trail of spreading ripples in his wake. “I remember,” Bucky finally says, but leaves it at that.

Steve waits, but he doesn’t go on. “Remember what?” he finally asks.

“You. Me,” he says slowly. “Most everything, I think.”

“Oh,” Steve breathes again. The unexpected rush of feeling welling up in his heart pushes the tears back into his eyes, but he blinks them away. “Okay.”

“I mean, I know what we were like. I know what I was like.” His eyes flick up to meet Steve’s again and then flick away just as quickly. “But I’m not like that anymore.”

There’s a long pause. Steve’s staring at their half-eaten sandwiches going cold on the table, trying to figure out what to say, trying to pull something out of his hat and hoping it’s a bouquet of flowers and not a dead dove. “You said once that you’re not like this in real life. Carefree, I mean. Happy. Is that still true?”

Another long silence, but it’s easy to wait this one out. Steve can almost hear the rapid whirr of the gears turning in Bucky’s head, until finally, he says, “No, it’s not. I mean. I remember being much more carefree. Careless, even. I found other things funny, there were other things that caught my eye, that I liked to do.”

“Like dancing,” Steve says.

“Yeah, like dancing.” He says it almost wonderingly. “I don’t feel like dancing now, I don’t think. But… but I guess I’m not as different as I used to be. As I used to think I was, I mean.”

“Well. At any rate,” Steve says, “it doesn’t matter what you’re like now. It doesn’t matter if you’re different, not to me.“

“But why not?” He sounds frustrated.

Now Steve actually thinks about it, for the first time. He’d said it didn’t matter, but he was just repeating what his heart told him to say, and now that Bucky wants an explanation, he’s not sure how to explain what feels so irrefutably convincing when it comes out of his mouth.

“I guess…” he starts, “if you think about the nature of the self—" and then breaks off again.

Bucky snorts. “Come on, Steve, don’t act like you know anything about ontology.”

“Ooh, big word for a man like you,” Steve snarks back, pulled, for the moment, out of the wooly labyrinth of his thoughts.

“Shut up,” Bucky says.

“You first.”

Neither one of them says anything else, a happy silence descending over the intimately familiar battlefield of mock-argument. Steve lays his head down on Bucky’s shoulder, the wool scratching comfortingly at his ear, smelling of nothing for the moment but grassy lanolin and clean, warm skin.

“Look,” he says after a while. “I don’t know how to explain it. But I like you the way you are now. I want you the way you are now, anything that you’ll give to me. If you’d let me, I’d… I’d grab you tight and never let you go.”

“Never let me go,” Bucky repeats, a murmur to himself, right as Carole Lombard appears at the tableside with the check. She lays it facedown and gives them a smile.

He wakes up. 


	12. Chapter 12

Steve wakes up slowly, something in him clinging to sleep, as if he could trick his way back into the dream by lying still and pretending that he’s not awake yet. He’s not ready to jump straight out of bed and into consciousness, not quite yet.

The window next to the bed is cracked; it’s silent outside, except for the general background murmur of faraway tires on pavement and the 21st-century thrum of air conditioning units and the distant, nearly-imperceptible sound of water doing its thing in the East River. A bird starts to twitter as he lies in bed and stares up at the ceiling lost in the murky darkness of the five minutes before dawn, some small thing that trills and then is silent, and then trills again.

Finally, he gets up and finds a clean shirt to pull on and goes downstairs to make coffee and, later, breakfast. Big day ahead—he’s going to see the diner.

It hadn’t taken Sam long to find it; it existed, and there was only one, The Good Morrow, at the corner of 4th and Lex in Manhattan. He’d shown Steve a blurry picture on the computer—it looked like every other New York street corner diner with a tin roof, a red-brick façade, and big plate-glass windows, so classic as to be nondescript.

He had waited for a whole week after seeing the name on the menu to look for it, out of fear or nerves, or something he can’t really put his finger on. But now that he knows it’s a real place, he’s eager to go see it for himself, to put a face to a name in the same way that he had put a name to a dream. He hears Sam moving around in his bedroom and gets up to pour him a cup of coffee and put a new pot on at the same time.

“You still here?” Sam asks when he comes through the kitchen doorway, scratching his chest through his t-shirt.

“It doesn’t open ‘til eight.” He glances at the clock sitting on the counter, propped up against the backsplash—they still haven’t gotten around to hanging it, yet. It’s five past seven.

“You know it’s gonna be crowded as hell on the subway at this time of the morning.”

“I’ll take a cab,” Steve says.

“Too good for the subway, huh?” Sam yawns and then drowns the end of the yawn in his coffee.

Steve flips him the bird, and then switches his coffee cup to the other hand and flips him the other bird for good measure, while Sam tuts and shakes his head. “You want to come with me?” Steve asks.

Sam blinks blearily at the cabinets while he considers, then says, “Yeah, sure, okay.”

“Still want to take the subway?” Steve gives him his biggest shit-eating grin, the one he reserves especially for Sam before 9 a.m.

“Shut up, Steve.” Sam flips him the bird in return.

Steve has the cab drop them off a few blocks away, saying that he needs to stretch his legs, but the closer they get to the destination, the more nervous he becomes. Exercise calms him down, though, and New York is fine and breezy on this late June morning, and he finds himself striding down the street with a lot more confidence in his strut than he actually feels on the inside.

Half a block later, though, Sam grabs his arm and pulls him to a halt in the middle of the busy sidewalk. “Christ, slow down. I’m having to jog to keep up with you.”

“Shit, sorry, I didn’t realize,” Steve says. He’d almost forgotten that Sam had come with him.

“Yeah. I can tell. What are you so nervous about?”

The street isn’t so crowded at this time of day, but there are people pushing past them all the same and a constant, rolling grumble about assholes blocking the sidewalk. Steve doesn’t really care, though, he’s focused on other things. “I… I don’t know.”

Sam gives him a long, searching look, but in the end, he just squeezes Steve’s arm and then drops his hand. “Okay. Then let’s keep going before some finance bro knifes us.”

When they get to the right corner they stand on the opposite sidewalk for a long while, just looking. Sam, to Steve’s relief, doesn’t say anything at all, but lets him take his time.

There’s a long row of big plate-glass windows along the front of the red-brick building that extend from the rounded tin roof almost to the ground. The door is framed in chrome, and a sign with the name of the diner in tall, red letters sits on the upper left-hand corner of the roof. It’s the kind of timeless New York diner that Steve had been to countless times before the war, that has remained unchanged ever since, the kind of place that will exist for a long while, yet.

Through the window halfway down the building, Steve can see their booth, or what would be their booth if this were the dream. He can feel something like a burgeoning headache, just the pressure of laboriously trying to comprehend the incomprehensible building up at the back of his skull. Should he even be trying to map the dream world onto a place that exists in real life? It has the same name and—as far as he can tell from outside—a similar interior, but what existential line has to be crossed before this is really _their_ booth in _their_ diner?

The morning sunlight that slips between two of the buildings behind him is reflecting redly off the window in a way that makes it difficult to see inside. But their booth looks the same—red vinyl seat, tall, upholstered back, the little plastic caddy of ketchup and salt and pepper and napkins sitting right up against the glass. There are people moving around inside, and a group exits the diner while they’re standing there—Steve can hear the faint jingle of a cluster of bells over the bustle of the street—but their booth remains empty.

“Do you want to go inside?” Sam asks quietly.

Does he? He’s still so afraid of breaking the spell—what if he pushes through the door and then tonight there is no dream? What if he closes his eyes on his low-lit bedroom and the quilt and the roofbeam and then when he opens his eyes again the sun is coming up over the houses on the other side of the garden, and in between, there’s nothing but the void?

It’s the only link he has with Bucky, it’s his lifeline, it’s the verdant, bird-haunted islet in the middle of the ocean onto which he has been cast away.

He doesn’t realize he’s starting to panic until Sam grabs his upper arm again, hard, digging his fingers in so that the pressure bordering on pain jolts him back to his senses.

“Steve, stop it. I can guess what you’re thinking.”

Steve just shakes his head and takes a deep breath. _Breathe for me, Steve._ He holds it and lets it out again, over and over, and the panic ebbs away until there’s only a blunt-edged lump of fear left sitting in the bottom of his heart. He can ignore it, now that it’s no longer slicing him open. It’s fine.

Still, he feels like Orpheus, half turned around on the threshold of the upper world. Was that the pale, sad face of Eurydice he’d caught sight of? Or was it just a figment of his imagination, a ghost seen out of the corner of his eye?

Sam squeezes his arm once more, a little harder, and Steve turns his back on the diner, no longer wanting to look at it. If he’s done any damage today, it’s done, but he can’t face the prospect of having ruined the one thing he needs the most. “I’m… I’m just afraid that something will happen if I go inside. What if… what if I go in and… and the dream stops? What if just coming here was enough? What if there’s no dream tonight?”

Sam uses the hand on his arm to steer him down the street, back the way they’d come, and then when it’s clear that Steve’s not going to resist, he lets go and slings his arm around Steve’s shoulders, instead, drawing him close. “You think he’s in New York, right?” he asks, and Steve nods. “And he said that he just needed a little more time?”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nothing. From what you’ve told me, though I know you haven’t told me everything, he’s said he’ll come to you when he’s ready. I don’t think it matters so much if you meet him in the dream, if he’s already sure that he’s going to come back eventually. He knows how to find you. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s staked out the building across the street and is watching you sleep every night.”

Steve can feel his heartbeat quicken at the thought, but he wisely says nothing.

“How about we get a cab back home and then we can do a Rocky marathon or something? To take your mind off of it.”

“I’ve never seen Rocky,” Steve says thoughtfully, “though it’s on my list,” at which Sam claps his free hand over his heart and says, “Oh lordy, you are in for a treat.”

When he finally goes up to the attic that night, after Rockies I-IV and another few rounds of margaritas and burgers made on the grill, he lies on the bed for the longest time, caught between wanting to go to sleep and wanting to stay awake. The anticipation gnaws at the pit of his stomach like a drip of water eroding a mountain of soft limestone, and he finds himself tossing and turning until his legs are swaddled sloppily in the sheets.

Eventually, he rolls off the mattress and walks around the foot of the bed to the window. The slope of the roof puts the gabled windows down close to the floor, low enough that he can sit cross-legged on the wooden boards and cross his arms on the sill, looking out into the street. He can’t see much—the hickory trees are exuberant in the fullness of summer, obscuring the houses across the way. But his own house sits back from the sidewalk, and he can see the front yards of all the houses on his side of the street if he cranes his neck.

What if Bucky is watching him? The back of his neck prickles under the imagined scrutiny, but at the same time, he feels something warm and comforting settle around his shoulders like an old blanket. Maybe Bucky’s on the roof across the street, hunkered down behind the low brick parapet and watching him through the leaves of the hickory. Perhaps he’s down on the sidewalk, crouched down behind a car or a van, or tucked into the dark shadows cast by front steps and entryways. Maybe he’s on the roof of the building behind Steve’s house, watching him through the windows on the other side of the attic.

He almost turns around, but doesn’t. If Bucky is watching him, let him watch as much as he wants. It makes him feel safe, protected in a way that’s strangely familiar. Nat had already taken a look at the inside of the house and pronounced it good enough to meet her high standards, and maybe Bucky is out there, somewhere, watching the outside, watching him sit on the floor in his boxers with his head tipped into the palm of one hand.

After he sits with the feeling for a few minutes, he figures out why it’s so familiar. He closes his eyes and sees himself in a wood at the head of a valley full of tall, dark larches and scrubby creeping pines and broken rocks covered with brilliant green moss. There’s a stream that burbles down the slope, covering the sound of their movements as they crawl through the undergrowth, glossy rhododendron and feathery bracken tall enough to cover a man sliding past on his belly. He gets behind cover, a big boulder the size of a hogshead, and waits for Gabe to make his own way through the undergrowth and wash up beside him. On the other side of the boulder is a short run down to the enemy camp, a handful of outliers guarding the north side of the base they’re going to be storming in just under five minutes.

He looks back up the slope at the dark coterie of trees, forbidding and stern and seemingly uninhabited. But he feels the prickle of scrutiny like the patter of soft fingertips across his cheek and glances back and forth, trying to spot Bucky in his sniper’s nest.

He hears the quick _pip-pippip_ of a quail to his left and looks, but sees nothing. Then it’s followed by the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo from the same spot, and he grins, bringing his gloved fingers up to his lips and blowing a silent kiss to where his own beloved cuckoo is perched.

All of a sudden, he realizes that he’s falling asleep, his eyes closed and his head pillowed on his arms on the windows. He shakes himself into some small pocket of wakefulness and pushes himself to his feet. Then on a whim, he brings his fingers to his lips and blows a kiss out the window to the world at large. Maybe Bucky’s out there; maybe he’s bringing the fingers of his own hand up to his lips in return. Maybe he’s not, but Steve is confident that his kiss will catch in the ferny leaves of the hickory and wait there until a future day when Bucky walks whistling up the street, easy and loose with his hands in his pockets, on his way home.

* * *

He puts his hand on the glass of the door and pushes it open. The little cluster of doorbells jingles above his head. Carole Lombard is standing behind the bar; he gives her a wave and walks over to the booth, where Bucky is waiting for him. As soon as he’d found himself pushing through the door, he’d felt drenched to the skin in an unexpected rain shower of relief. He’s sure it’s written as plain as day across his face; in fact, Bucky is looking at him curiously as he pauses beside the table, unaware of why Steve has the face of a man who has just found the treasure he was sure had been lost to him forever.

_Do I tell him or not, do I tell him or not,_ Steve thinks to himself, mulling it over as he slides into the booth. Somehow, it feels like a secret, but he’s not really sure why. He wouldn’t be surprised if Bucky already knew, if he’d somehow ferreted the information out long before Steve, with his careless naivete, did. But then if Bucky knows and hasn’t said anything, he must have a reason. At any rate, it’s still a secret that’s a little raw around the edges, and he decides to keep it to himself for a while longer.

Bucky is still looking at him curiously, but when Steve is halfway down the bench, he scoots over to meet him, and then further so that he’s right in Steve’s space, blocking out half of the sunlight from the big window, a late, late afternoon kind of light when the sun is already halfway below the horizon. “Did you see it?” he asks without preamble, and Steve’s mind flicks frantically through all its cue cards before he finally says, “Wha…?” like the ding dong he is.

Bucky jerks his chin toward the other side of their booth, and Steve looks, but can’t see anything but the cracked red vinyl and an invisible Steve-shaped space where he used to sit. But then Bucky says, “No, at the end of the aisle.”

Steve pushes his at-will glasses up his nose and looks, and like a looming iceberg resolving itself out of the mist, a jukebox comes into being at the end of the aisle that runs between the booths and the bar. It’s the kind of machine that Steve remembers from before the war, nearly as tall as he is, with a solid, polished-wood body and colored lights that run in an arch around the selection menu.

“That’s…” he starts, and almost continues, _not there in real life_ , but he catches himself.

Bucky finishes the sentence for him, though. “A jukebox, yes, very good Steve.”

When Steve turns to look at him, their noses almost collide, Bucky’s so close. Steve starts back, his heart doing a jig in his chest, but he pushes his face into a frown, trying not to look flustered or—inevitably—turned on. “Shut up,” he says petulantly. “I know what a jukebox is.”

“But do you know how to dance?” Bucky asks with a grin. It’s sarcastic and teasing, could even be called malicious if there was anything mean in it, and it just confirms to Steve what he already knows: Bucky remembers.

“I’ll have you know I’m a wonderful dancer,” he says, and Bucky laughs in his face. It’s more than a chuckle, and if Steve didn’t know any better, he’d call it a giggle. In fact, he’s about to call it a giggle out loud when he hears Carole Lombard walk up to the table.

“I, uh,” he says, at a loss, but she’s left the menu and disappeared before he can think of what to order. He turns back to Bucky, who has moved back a reasonable distance and is watching him with a grin that’s just a shade too soft to be a smirk. “What do _you_ want to eat?” Steve asks peevishly.

Bucky’s eyes widen and he looks a little shocked, but recovers his composure quickly. “I’ve never thought about it before. You’re always the one who orders.”

“Sure,” Steve shrugs. “Because at… at the beginning I don’t think you could. But I’m pretty sure you can, now.”

Bucky looks at him for a long moment, his blue eyes two serious hollows under the shadow of his brow. Steve looks back, struck by how changeable his face is, how like the sky on a brisk spring day, when the clouds flit across the face of the sun with breathtaking speed. But before Steve can say anything, he hears Carole Lombard behind him, and Bucky looks over his shoulder. “Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he says. “With strawberry jam, please.”

Steve hears her whisk the menu off the table and click briskly away, but he doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look away from Bucky’s face and the expressive tilt of his strong, dark brows as he says ‘please.’

He meets Steve’s eye again with a sharp, intuitive look, and his cheeky grin jumps back into being. “What were we talking about before we got interrupted?” He glances up at the ceiling in thought and taps his forefinger on his chin. His nail is a perfect smooth oval, the slick, hidden pink of a queen conch. Steve wants to put it in his mouth. “Oh yes,” Bucky continues, “you were saying you’re a wonderful dancer.”

Steve crosses his arms over his chest. “Uh huh,” he says flatly, but it thrills him hugely to know that he knows exactly where this conversation is headed. That he can read Bucky like a book, again, after everything, feels like a miracle. The way he needles Steve affectionately feels like coming home after a long stay away.

“So I guess you’re going to have to show me. Jog my memory,” Bucky says, waggling his eyebrows.

“You can’t fool me, Buck,” Steve says haughtily. “I know you remember.”

Bucky’s face softens, then, into something happier, fonder. “Yeah, I do.” He scoots closer to Steve holding his hand out between them. Long fingers, warm palm, the deep thrum of the connection that vibrates between them, a low purr, now, instead of anything earth-shaking. “It’s wild how much stuff has come back to me in the last four months.”

“It’s amazing.” He squeezes Bucky’s hand in his. “That’s so much better than what anyone was expecting.”

Bucky frowns minutely, a pin-scratch line of worry appearing between his eyebrows. But as fast as it appears, it disappears. “What, you got an army of doctors waiting to stick me in a scanner, or what?” he asks, plastering over the worry with banter.

“No! No. Just me.” Steve looks down at the tangle of their hands between them. “And Sam and Nat, but mostly me.”

The clack of a ceramic plate set down on the formica tabletop snaps him out of his reverie, and when he turns around, Carole Lombard is already turning back to the register. “Thank you,” he calls on some instinctual impulse of politeness, and feels Bucky squeeze his hand harder before letting him go.

He picks up his sandwich—fluffy white bread, smooth brown crust, red jam dripping out of the crosswise slice like sweet blood—and takes a bite. “Really, though, after we’re done, we should go check out the jukebox,” Bucky says, muffled around the food in his mouth.

“I don’t know.” Steve feels nervous, but he can’t tell if it’s the prospect of breaking the invisible rules that govern—or not—the dream world, or if it’s the prospect of… dancing. “I thought you said you didn’t feel like dancing anymore.” He glances at Bucky out of the corner of his eye, sees him narrowing his own eyes and trying to reign in the grin that’s twitching at the corner of his mouth. “I thought you’d said you’d changed,” Steve says plaintively, trying for a joke and praying that it lands, and when Bucky bursts out laughing, he laughs along gracelessly in an excess of relief.

“What’s the matter, Steve, worried you might step on my toes?” Bucky says after a moment.

Steve rolls his eyes, but he says, “No, I mean, I don’t exactly know what it is that’s keeping up the circus tent of this dream, but I’m afraid something will happen if we don’t follow the same pattern as always.” He finishes one of his triangles and picks up the other, then turns in his seat so that he’s facing Bucky, crooking his left leg on the bench, knee on Bucky’s thigh.

“If the jukebox is there, it’s got to mean something, though, doesn’t it?” Bucky asks. “I think it means we’re supposed to put a nickel in it. See what happens.”

Steve bites his lip, licks off the trace of peanut butter he finds there. “You’re probably right.” He can’t think of any other excuses, and he finds himself eating slower and slower, rolling the half-chewed sandwich around his mouth on the pretense of savoring it, the summer-brightness of it, the sweet, illicit tang of strawberries stolen out of a neighbor’s window box. But deep down inside, he knows he’s trying to buy time because he really doesn’t know how to dance. Or rather, he does, but it’s theory to him, it might as well be a page of calculus with a question mark at the very bottom. He can see the individual numbers alright, but how the hell they go together to make something coherent, he’s never been able to figure out.

Finally, Bucky has finished both triangles of his own sandwich and wiped the crumbs off his fingers with his napkin, and has sat for a long while with his head tipped into his hand, watching the side of Steve’s face as he slowly whittles his own sandwich down, nibble by nibble. “Alright, Steve,” he says, “you’ve dawdled long enough. Put that down and scoot out the end there and let’s go see what that jukebox is all about.”

Steve still has half of his second triangle to finish, but he doesn’t protest. Still as superstitious as ever, he leaves the quarter sandwich on his plate and scoots out of the bench to stand awkwardly in the middle of the aisle.

He looks around and finds the usual crowd at the bar and in the other booths, ghostly and vague, like shades in the asphodel meadows. All the ambient noises are muted, as if they’re wrapped in a thick fog, and he can hardly pick out any individual sound. If anyone is watching them, he can’t tell; there are no discernable faces, nothing to indicate they’ve piqued anyone’s interest. Nor, even, that there’s anything resembling an interest to pique.

His heart jumps up into his throat when Bucky stands up beside him, grinning down into his face like an oak looking down at an acorn. He’s just so small, and Bucky’s just so… big. Steve barely comes up to his chin; his eyes are level with the divot where Bucky’s collarbones meet, a few wisps of dark hair showing through the torn collar of his green shirt against his pink and wheat-gold chest. Steve closes his eyes for a blink that’s just a split second too long and grinds his teeth against the shiver that wants to run all over his skin. “Shall we?” Bucky says, too much knowledge in his voice.

The jukebox is only a dozen feet away, but it feels like a mile. Should he reach out for Bucky’s hand? Should he say something? What if he steps on Bucky’s toes? What if Bucky gets mad because Steve grinds his toes to powder? They’ve never done this before, it’s uncharted territory. Back when Steve was this small, he refused to dance, refused to even try to learn, because he knew he was incapable of it and so there was no point in trying in the first place.

“What should we pick?” Bucky asks, running his finger down the glass and reading some of the titles out under his breath. There’s a whole list of songs on the selection panel, some of which he recognizes, some of which he doesn’t. It’s not easy to focus on the words; Bucky seems to have a much easier time reading in the dream than he does. He pushes his glasses up his nose, which doesn’t really help, and says, “I don’t know, why don’t you pick one? You were always the one who knew what there was to know about music.”

“Alright,” Bucky says. His hands are in the pockets of his loose trousers. “Do you have a nickel?”

“No,” Steve scoffs, “how am I gonna have a nickel? What does this look like, the bank?”

“Come on, check your pockets.” Bucky slides one hand out of his own pocket and taps Steve lightly on the hip.

Steve rolls his eyes, but he sticks his hand in his pocket, anyway. “Oh.” He pulls it out. There’s a nickel in the center of his palm, dull silver glinting in the warm, incandescent light that glows diffusely through the diner. Off to his right, the big windows are nearly dark, the sun having set all the way, whatever passes for dusk settling around the dream like a light cloak.

“What’d I tell you,” Bucky says, and swipes the nickel off his palm.

While he’s slotting it into the machine and fiddling around with the controls, Steve sticks his hand in his pocket again, on impulse, and comes up with something else.

A button.

Round, two holes, bakelite, probably, the dull brown of a peanut shell. He runs his thumb over its face, and it feels rough, scuffed, as if it had been caught on something, wrenched away. He wants to spin Bucky around and hold the button up to his throat to fill in the empty space, to complete the row, the last piece of the puzzle. Would there be a magical transformation, Bucky converted into a prince before his very eyes?

It feels like a temptation, but to what flavor of sin, he doesn’t know. Is he supposed to want to fill in whatever gaps are still showing in the frame of Bucky’s mind? Is he being given a choice, perhaps, to change things rather than letting them run their natural course? 

_I want you the way you are now,_ he thinks. _Anything that you’ll give to me_.

He looks at the button, turning it over and over between his fingers, and then shakes his head minutely and slips his hand back in his pocket, dropping the button into the linty corner right as Bucky turns around and says, “ _De temps en temps_ , Josephine Baker. It’s a good one. I remember it.”

Then, as the song trickles softly out of the jukebox speakers, beginning with a few muted horns, he steps closer to Steve and holds his hand out. His mouth is cocked up in a one-sided grin, and his red velvet tongue is pushing at the corner, one sliver of pearly incisor glinting underneath.

Steve’s heart is beating so hard and so fast he’s afraid it’s going to burst his eardrums. He doesn’t understand why he feels so shy—he thinks, unavoidably, back to the other day, sitting in the booth with his hand on Bucky’s thigh, whispering into his ear _like fucking into the very center of the Earth itself_ , thinks about jerking off, knowing that Bucky was probably jerking off, too, on the other side of the city _—_ but he’s about to spontaneously combust from sheer bashfulness and drop into a pile of ashes with a wheeze and a poof.

But he takes Bucky’s hand, which clutches his tight and absorbs the tremor that runs through it, and Bucky slides the other one around to the small of his back, resting lightly, not grasping, just touching. He pulls Steve close, until Steve has to tilt his head back to look up into Bucky’s face, and then as Josephine Baker starts to sing, he smiles, slight and affectionate. “It’s not the foxtrot, Steve. Just follow my lead.” And Steve does, giving himself up to the vertiginous feeling of dancing with the man he loves.

Eventually, he lays his head down on Bucky’s shoulder, right at the comfortable swell where his collarbone meets his chest, and closes his eyes, letting himself be swallowed up by the music and the hypnotic sway of their bodies back and forth. The song seems to go on forever; it’s not that it’s repeating, just that Josephine Baker seems to find more and more verses that were never in the original. At the same time, he feels like a delicately balanced spell has been cast about the two of them, contingent on the way he holds his head, the movement of his feet, the steadiness of each breath. If he opens his eyes at the wrong time, if he thinks too hard about this miraculous, chimerical dream, it will all come crashing down.

Eventually, though, the song winds down, or the nickel stretches to its final cent and the jukebox falls silent. They still sway together to the invisible echo of the music for a moment, until Bucky stops and leans back so that Steve has to pull his head up and look up into his face. What he sees there makes his mouth grow dry—he knows that look, he’s been intimately familiar with that look for years. It’s that bullheaded mixture of affection and determination to see a thing through. Bucky’s about to kiss him.

So Steve beats him to the punch.

He doesn’t know what he’d expected; in fact, he hadn’t expected anything, having never thought that they’d be doing anything other than holding hands in the dream world. If he’d thought about it, he would have expected something like the feeling he got when their hands first touched—an electric shock, at the very least, if not actually the full whip-crack of a bright aurora.

But when he puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders and pushes himself up on his toes and leans in to brush their lips together, there’s nothing but the soft, quiet hush of a kiss between two people who’ve kissed each other a hundred thousand times before. Bucky’s lips are soft and warm, the velvet scratch of the stubble at the corner of his mouth a comforting, familiar rasp. It’s almost overwhelming in its simplicity, the vital essence of a kiss, tenderness distilled into one press of flesh to flesh. It’s an understatement that is shocking in how much it says with how little breath.

He pulls back a little, not leaving more than a few inches between them, but enough to see Bucky’s face. His eyes are closed; he looks like he’s been raptured, not in body, but in soul.

“Buck?” Steve whispers. The diner is dead silent. He doesn’t look around to see if anyone is watching them; he’s certain without knowing how that there’s no one else here, not a shadow, not a shade. Only Steve, and Bucky.

Bucky’s eyes open just a sliver, not even enough to part the tangle of his eyelashes. Steve can see the blue of his irises like a sliver of evening sky glimpsed through a cave mouth. He feels so close to something momentous, the open air of the upper world is within reach—they’re almost free.

“Do that again,” Bucky whispers, and then he grins, and Steve grins back, the tenderness morphing into a hunger so fierce he feels like he’s being turned inside out. Like he’s one fraying thread away from ripping that raggedy shirt open down its half-button placket so that he can get at Bucky’s chest, at his heart, at the great fiery brawn of him, and then push him down on the floor and—

But then Bucky looks over Steve’s shoulder and his brow tightens minutely. “Uh, Steve,” he says, and Steve swivels around to see Carole Lombard rounding the corner of the bar with the check. “Wait—” he says, but she lays the slip of paper facedown on their table and turns her head to give them a smile over her shoulder.

He wakes up.


	13. Chapter 13

When he opens his eyes, the first thing he does is raise his hand to his lips and press them there, the pale imitation of a kiss. And then he grins up at the roofbeam, his mouth splitting wider and wider until his fingertips can no longer cover the great chasm of giddy joy.

All of the fear of yesterday seems to have disappeared, washed clean overnight by that one soft kiss. He doesn’t even really think about it before he decides to go back to the diner again today, maybe for lunch. Check out the menu, see what the place looks like on the inside. Does one of the waitresses look like Carole Lombard? Are the bells over the door hung on a green cord? Is there a jukebox with Josephine Baker on it? Do songs still cost a nickel each?

And then tonight, he can tell Bucky all about it. Maybe he’d like to know that it’s a real place, or at least it’s based on a real place, and… and even if there’s no dream tonight, even if he breaks the spell, he knows that Bucky is out there somewhere, not too far away, possibly looking up at the ceiling of his own apartment or squat or hotel room and thinking about the way Steve’s lips had felt against his own.

Steve closes his eyes again and allows himself to luxuriate in the indecent pleasure of taking the dream a step further, of leaning back in to kiss Bucky again, open his mouth, lick inside. Would his breath be as hot against Steve’s palate as his hand against the small of Steve’s back? What would he taste like?

Steve remembers the taste of his kisses like it was just yesterday; he remembers vividly the last time he’d kissed Bucky up against a tree in a cold, snowy forest in Austria. But nevermind—he hadn’t tasted like strawberry jam, then. It had been a sweet kiss, but it had left a bitter taste on his tongue that he’d tried futilely to wash away, later, with a bottle of whiskey in a bombed-out pub.

He shakes his head to clear his thoughts. That cold, white forest in Austria is so far away in time and space, it might as well be on the moon. Right now, it’s the end of June, and the forecast says it’s going to be hot and sunny with a good breeze off the water. The sky is lightening in the east and there’s a bag of yesterday’s bagels downstairs, waiting to be split and toasted and drizzled with dark, pungent honey from Nat’s little jar.

He gets out of bed and pulls on yesterday’s shirt and makes his way silently down the stairs. Sam’s still asleep; Steve can hear his deep, easy breathing as he tiptoes past his door in the second-floor hallway.

While he’s waiting for the bagels toast and the coffee to brew, he leans back against the counter and thinks about the diner again. He feels a little less confident than he had lying in bed, coming down off the high of being freshly kissed. _What if I fuck it up?_ says his brain, and it grates harshly across his early-morning serenity .

So, he resorts to his tried-and-true tactic for when he needs to be reassured about something, and slides his phone off the counter and opens the mail app. _I’d like to make a reservation at Casa della Pizza,_ he writes, _sometime today, any time before 12:00 p.m. is fine. Thank you!_ He types the numerical email address into the appropriate field, and off it goes.

He’s on his second bagel and his third cup of coffee when the phone rings, an unlisted number, which inevitably makes his heart jump into his throat even though he knows, he _knows_ it’s not Bucky.

He slides his thumb across the screen to answer the call. “Hey, I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“Nah, it’s the middle of the day where I am.” Nat’s voice comes down the line as clear as a bell; wherever she is must have excellent cell service. _Not Mars_ ,he thinks, and a little hopeful voice says, _New York?_ But he knows she would have dropped in in person if she was around, and it’s certainly not the middle of the day in New York.

“Just, uh, just wanted to tell you that we found out the diner is actually a real place. Or based on a real place. Me and Sam, I mean.”

“Oh, really?” She sounds intrigued, with that subtle chirp in her voice that means he has all of her attention. Even though she’s halfway across the world, he feels the physical weight of being observed, but comfortingly, benevolently. Sometimes Nat feels like his big sister, and sometimes it feels like his big sister is god.

“Yeah, Sam actually asked me to see if I could find some way to identify it. Some detail from the dream, I mean.” He tells her about the menu, the name of the diner, how he and Sam had gone yesterday to look at it, but he’d been too scared to go in. He can hear the tik-tak of her fingers on the keyboard on the other end of the line. “Are you doing spy stuff?”

She laughs, a warm, closed-mouth chuckle. “Of course. I do spy stuff in my sleep, Steven.” There’s a pause, _tik-tak tik-tak_. “Nothing out of the ordinary, it’s just a regular diner, been there since 1945. Nothing in my files to suggest any connection to you.”

“Well, it’s not a part of Manhattan I ever spent any time in, and since it wasn’t opened until ‘45 I never could have gone there…” He trails off, listening to her quick fingers moving over the keyboard, willing information into existence. It’s a comfortingly terrifying competence when he knows he’s getting the benefit of it.

“Why… why do you think this is happening, Nat? Or I guess the more important question is, is someone making this happen?” It’s a question he hasn’t really asked himself in any depth, not since he realized that they were sharing the same dream every night, since he realized it wasn’t his subconscious trying to torture him for past crimes. Maybe he should have started asking these questions long, long ago, but…

“Look, I hate to have to admit this out loud. As a consummate spy, it pains me, right here”—he knows she’s got her hand over her heart—“to say it, but… I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“But…”

“But nothing. This is a problem I’ve been trying to solve since the second time you had this dream, way back in April. This information about the name of the diner clarifies exactly nothing for me, and, to tell you the painful truth, unless something changes, I’m inclined to just drop it into the big round bin marked ‘unsolved.’”

Steve takes a deep breath and then drains his cup of coffee to the last drop, as if the answer might lie in the muddy grounds at the bottom of the mug.

“The universe is a very big place, Steve,” she goes on. “Big in more ways than we can count, and there are things out there that even I can’t explain. You’ve seen a lot of strange stuff and I’ve seen even more than that, things you wouldn’t believe if I told you. But even then, the sum total of what I know wouldn’t fill a dollhouse teacup.”

He sits with that for a moment and she lets him, the occasional mouse-click zipping down the line, but nothing else.

“But I can’t… I mean…” He breaks off and scrubs a hand over his face, trying to collect his thoughts. “Do you think something or… someone out there is trying to… what? Bring us together? In our dreams? But why? How?” He knows he sounds a little desperate, but he feels like a cat rubbed persistently the wrong way. It’s just so weird. It doesn’t feel wrong, but it’s not transparent, either, not the crystal-clear circumstances he likes to operate under.

“I told you, Steve, I don’t know the answer to this riddle. You could go ask Strange if you want, but…” She trails off, drawing the word out.

“Yeah.” Maybe he doesn’t actually want to know.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Nat murmurs.

“That’s not _The Princess Bride_ ,” Steve huffs. “You’re losing your touch.”

Nat laughs at him from the other end of the line and then drops her voice an octave. Steve can picture her looking at him over the top of a book, her glasses pushed down her nose, as she says, in a New York accent as thick as cold butter, “Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True love. Miracles.” Then her voice pops back up to its normal alto register. “How about that? I think we’re at the miracles part of this story, now.”

Steve scoffs. “If that’s your criteria, wouldn’t the whole thing be the miracle part? And anyway,” he goes on, irritated, now, at the sheer inexplicability of it all, “this isn’t a fucking fairy tale.”

“No. But what are miracles but the intervention of something we can’t explain? Why not just consider this a miracle? Something out there wants to bring you and Bucky together, and has found a way to make it happen. There have been no consequences, no drawbacks to this unconventional matchmaking, as far as we can see. So why not just leave it at that?”

“But…”

“Look, I know what you’re thinking. But don’t you think it was an incredible stroke of luck that Erskine found you and you got the serum in the first place? That you got to Europe right on time to drag him out of Kreischberg before he was killed? That you and Bucky both survived long enough to meet again in the 21st century? How many twists of fate led to you standing under the overpass when his mask fell off? This is a little harder to accept, but only because it’s so far outside the realm of ordinary experience that you can’t just brush it off as chance. But it fits the pattern of the rest of your life. The intervention of something you can’t explain.”

“Jesus,” he says after a long while.

“Yeah, I know it’s hard to stomach. Believe me, I hate luck, I hate fate, I hate being moved by forces outside of my control.” He can hear the bitterness in her voice as she says it. He wonders briefly why, but Nat would tell him if she wanted him to know. “I always want to know where I stand and I want to be able to choose the way I got there. But I don’t think that’s the way the universe works, Steve.”

“Alright,” he says. “Okay. So, do you think it’s okay if I go back to the diner today? And go in?”

“I don’t deal in certainties,” she says, and he mumbles “yeah, yeah” and makes a get-on-with-it motion with his hand, as if she could actually see him. “But I don’t think you’ll be hurting yourself if you go.”

“Thanks, Nat. Thank you. I was probably going to go anyway, but I just… I wanted your approval.”

“You always have my approval, Steve. Except when you do something stupid like jump out of a plane without a parachute.” He can hear the snap as she closes the lid of her laptop. Winding up the conversation, a restless spider in the center of an ever-shifting web, always on to the next thing before the last thing is finished. “But then you know you won’t be getting my approval, anyway, which is why you never ask.”

* * *

This time, he goes back to the diner alone. Sam had come downstairs not long after he’d hung up with Natasha and had offered to accompany him again, but Steve wanted to do it by himself. He leaves the house a little before midday and walks down the sidewalk under the young, green hickories in a perfect tumble of nerves, his insides singing with emotion like a lavender bush at the end of spring, alive with the hum of a hundred thousand bees.

The sun is shining brightly; the forecast was right, it’s a brilliantly blue summer day, hot in the way it’s only hot at the end of June. It’s a giddy heat, not yet soured by the long, interminable days of July and August where the heat presses down like a wet blanket. No, this is the weather for flying kites, for lying on a blanket in the park, for drinking lemonade and forgetting to put on sunscreen accidentally-on-purpose. It’s a beautiful day, and he feels nervous but light on his feet, full of cloud-stuff and fizz.

The cab drops him off a couple blocks away, like last time. He strides down the sidewalk, not bothering to modulate his pace now that there’s no mortal soul trying to keep up with him. His heart pounds in his chest as he stops in front of the diner, looks both ways, and jogs across the street. There’s a ginkgo growing out of its little fenced-in well in the sidewalk at the corner, just a small, skinny thing whose trunk is hardly as big around as his forearm, but he touches it anyway as he walks past on some strange impulse—for luck.

He stops in front of the door for a moment, but midday traffic is pushing past him, people flowing up and down the street on both sides, and he doesn’t have time to talk himself out of it. He only has time to dodge between two groups of chattering business types and put his hand on the smudged glass door and push it open and walk inside. Bells jingle merrily over his head. He glances up and finds a cluster of them like brass mistletoe berries hanging from a loop of green cord—exactly what he’d expected.

Across from him is the long chrome-topped bar and a cash register, but it’s the modern grey plastic kind that shows the numbers in red on an LED display. There’s a young woman standing behind the register, blond hair curled around her ears in a short bob, but that’s where her resemblance to Carole Lombard ends. She smiles at him politely and gestures to his left.

He swivels on his heel and there it is, their booth, the last empty one in the row. He walks over and slides in along the bench, which is covered in cracked red vinyl over worn-out spongy foam. The table is cream-colored formica with a tin rim around the edge, and there’s a little basket at the end of the table next to the big plate-glass window with a bottle of ketchup and packets of sugar and two little cut-glass towers of salt and dusty pepper.

He looks around; the diner is full of people, businesspeople, mostly, but there are also a few well-heeled ladies in sundresses and a group of the ubiquitous New York grandpa type, pounding on the table with liver-spotted fists and bursting into wheezing fits of laughter.

The server comes over and hands him a menu. “Can I get you something to drink?” she asks, and he’s so taken aback by the fact that she talked to him that he goggles at her for a moment before he catches himself. “Yeah, uh, s-sure,” he stammers, “a-a cup of coffee, splash of milk.”

When she turns to go back to the bar, he looks down at the menu in his hand, his big hand attached to his big wrist at the end of his frankly enormous forearm. The incongruity is startling, and a thread of plain grief wraps around his throat for a second before he manages to focus on the menu. On the front is a picture of a hamburger, classic quarter-pounder with green lettuce, yellow cheese, and a red tomato between two sesame-speckled buns, but not very realistic, more Sailor Jerry than Norman Rockwell. He opens the menu and peers at the left-hand page. There are two columns, and he scans down the first column without really looking at it, too agitated to really take in anything that he’s reading. His head is full of pencil shavings, his chest is a beehive— _out of the strong, something sweet_ , he hears his ma say.

He closes his eyes for just a second on the bustling diner and the sunlight pouring in through the window and the river of life flowing by outside. He can picture her perfectly, sitting on the edge of the bed in her Sunday best. She’s just come back from evening mass, and when she leans over to kiss his forehead, he can smell the faint intimations of smoke and myrrh and wood polish clinging to her dress, the smell of threadbare velvet and Latin, the smell of God.

He’d been left at home, too ill to go out but well enough to lie in bed and read comics, for which he is thankful. By the time she gets home, he’s sleepy and ready to close his eyes on a long day of coughing and wheezing, so she sits on the edge of the bed and makes him put the comic away and tells him the story of Samson’s riddle: out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.

He loves this story, even though—or perhaps, because—it ends in bloodshed and violence, just as he loves all the stories she tells him about Samson. He dreams, one day, of being that big, of growing up to fight strong men, of muscles straining under rough cloth, of heroism. It’s all a confused jumble in his head; he’s still too small to have figured it out, why he loves the story of Samson, why raw strength is so powerfully attractive to him, why he makes Bucky flex his own skinny arm so that they can compare their underwhelming biceps.

Because he’s too small to have figured it out, he’s also too small to feel the sting of shame about it, so he tells his mother, for the hundredth time, how he wants to grow up to be strong enough to kill a lion. She smiles down at him indulgently and leans over to kiss him on the forehead again. “There are many different ways to be strong, my darling,” she says. Then she gets up, the bedsprings creaking as their burden is lifted, and stands in front of the little mirror over the pasteboard dresser to take the pins out of her hair. “And there are just as many different ways to be sweet.”

He opens his eyes again when the door of the diner opens, the cluster of bells jingling on their cord. He glances up, and his heart stops for one interminable, earth-splitting moment.

There stands Bucky in the doorway, his brow knit, looking wary, but curious. Superficially, he looks like the Bucky that Steve met on the helicarrier, but half a moment’s closer look reveals him to be someone slightly different, a Bucky that Steve’s never seen before. He’s lean, but muscular, the broad curve of his shoulder in profile like a boulder straining the material of his long-sleeved red shirt. He’s wearing dark jeans and a dark glove on his left hand, and a thick beard softens the sharp line of his jaw. His hair is long, longer than the last time that Steve saw him, so many months ago, when it fell about his face in dull, lank strands. Now, he’s got it pulled back into a short tail at the nape of his neck and it gleams like polished teak in the sunlight streaming through the door behind him.

He looks so different, and yet exactly the same, lively and full of grace. Steve watches as he nods to the waitress behind the register and then turns to the booth, their booth. 

He freezes for a moment, just looking at Steve, his mouth parted on a word that’s lost in the hustle and bustle of clinking china and silverware and the hubbub of conversation in the diner. Steve doesn’t know if he himself is breathing or what kind of expression is slapped across his face; in fact, he knows nothing at all, every atom in his body focused on one thing and one thing only.

He watches as some small emotion passes over Bucky’s face—relief, trepidation, vertigo?—but it all disappears when he breaks into a face-splitting smile, his eyes almost disappearing into masses of happy wrinkles. He walks up to the booth.

He looks down at Steve and Steve looks up at him, both of them grinning like high-voltage jack-o-lanterns. Bucky reaches out with his left hand in the soft leather glove and nudges Steve’s fingers where they lie forgotten on the table. Steve immediately, automatically, turns his hand over and grasps Bucky’s fingers between his own. There’s no electric shock, no profound thrum roaring through his marrow; on the contrary, he feels like a balloon untethered or a knot untied by the flick of a clever wrist. The leather glove is warm, the metal underneath hard and alive with tension and purpose, and he strokes his thumb across Bucky’s knuckles, once, twice.

When he looks up again, Bucky is gazing down at him, joy written across his face with a bold hand.

“Hi,” he says. There’s a waver in his voice, almost imperceptible. “Mind if I sit here?”

Steve knows that the waver is echoed across his face, that his voice is going to shatter into a thousand dancing slivers of glass as soon as he speaks. But he doesn’t hesitate. “Yes, please. Go ahead.”

A bell jingles somewhere far away, a poppy lifts its head to look at the sun, a bright spark arcs between two live wires, and Bucky sits down next to him, pulling his gloved hand out of Steve’s so that he can slide into the booth. Then he holds out his hand out again and Steve takes it, lacing their fingers together, a button in the right buttonhole and a line that has no end.


	14. Epilogue

Steve wakes up because he hears the front door close softly downstairs, the latch clicking into place and the key turning in the lock—the house is secure once again. He cracks an eye and squints blearily out into the attic, nearly pitch-dark in the long, gloomy, pre-dawn morning. It’s the day before the winter solstice.

_That was probably Sam leaving for work_ , he thinks muzzily, his head full of the kind of cotton wool that’s carded off of a good night’s sleep. _Which means it’s not yet seven._

He thinks about getting out of bed and going downstairs to see if Sam’s left any coffee, but then he hears the pad of familiar feet coming up the staircase, as recognizable as the beating of his own heart. He closes his eyes again and smiles to himself, snuggling back down under the eiderdown duvet until only the top of his head is sticking out into the cold air of the attic. It’s frigid up here on winter mornings if he doesn’t turn on the space heater, but he generates enough body heat that he’s as warm as a jacket potato in a bed of hot coals—as long as he stays under the covers.

The door at the bottom of the attic stairs opens and the steps make their amiable frog-pond noises. Woolen socks whisper lightly on the wooden floor as the footsteps round the end of the bed, and the mattress dips under the weight of a heavy body as it slips under the duvet on the other side. Then an ice-cold hand is pressed lightly to the back of his neck.

“Jesus fuck,” Steve barks through gritted teeth, cringing away from the offending hand. Bucky laughs under his breath, a low bubbling giggle like the sound of a stony brook.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No, but I was only twenty percent awake. Now I’m a hundred and twenty percent awake, asshole,” Steve says, and rolls over. Bucky is looking at him from the other pillow, his dark hair a wild mess on the white cotton, his eyes a flinty blue that sparkle even in the dark room, lit by some interior fire that Steve catches glimpses of every once in a while.

“Good morning,” Bucky says, his happy grin like a line of bunting hung across Steve’s heart.

He reaches his hand out from under the duvet and cups the side of Bucky’s face, stroking a thumb across the smooth skin under his eye and then tucking it into the corner of his mouth, giving it a tug. “You interrupted my beauty sleep, the least you can do is kiss me hello,” he says, frowning severely.

Bucky just grins at him some more and pushes himself up onto one elbow so that he can lean over Steve. But he doesn’t kiss him, not yet; instead, he presses his cheek to Steve’s temple, rubbing his beard against Steve’s ear like a jaguar marking its territory. It’s been six months, and Steve’s still not used to the feeling of his beard, the way it scratches and tickles, the goosebumps it sends racing over his skin.

“Did you sleep well?” Bucky murmurs.

“Hmm, yeah. But I had a really weird dream.”

Bucky reaches down with his metal hand and draws the duvet up over their heads, trapping their mingled body heat in one big cocoon. “Oh yeah? What kind of dream?” he asks lightly.

“Oh,” Steve says breezily, “I dreamed I woke up one morning and found true love in my bed.”

It’s blacker than black under the duvet, nothing but the faint silver sheen of Bucky’s eyes to show Steve where he is in the close, sleep-smelling dark. Bucky scoots closer, until their noses are almost touching. “Strange dream,” he says.

Steve laughs. This is a scene they’ve repeated over and over again, and the dialogue is always the same, phrases so comfortable and well-worn that they’ve lost all their meaning. They might as well be saying, _I love you_ and, _I love you, too_.

“What about you?”

Bucky shrugs. “Normal. Went downstairs at three, slept til Sam got up.” The room across the hall from Sam’s is technically Bucky’s room, but it’s mostly a refuge he can retreat to when he needs to be alone. He usually goes to sleep with Steve in the big bed in the attic and then moves downstairs at some point during the night. Steve would like to wake up with him every morning, too, but Bucky still doesn’t sleep very well, and often gets up in the middle of the night to prowl around the house. Then he usually goes back to sleep in his own room and gets up at six to make breakfast for Sam so that they can snipe at each other across the kitchen island without Steve’s frowning face ruining their fun.

“And now you’ve come to bother me when I was having a nice dream about true love.” Steve pulls a face in the dark, though Bucky can’t see him, and then scoots a little closer. His knees bump up against Bucky’s thighs and he clutches at the thick sweater that Bucky’s wearing, his fingers sinking into the soft wool.

He feels Bucky shift on the mattress and then the metal hand slides up under the hem of his hoodie and squeezes his waist softly. It’s already warm, the metal like a hungry ghost that sucks up all the living warmth in its immediate surroundings. It’s like a cat that always wants to snuggle, or a new lover who can’t bear to be parted from the furnace of Steve’s body for longer than necessary.

He knows that Bucky can sense temperature with the metal hand but is not physically affected by it, and yet there’s something in him that can’t bear the chill that seems to linger in the titanium. So Steve has gotten used to the ice-cold hand slithering up his sleeve or under his shirt or down the leg of his pants. As if he’s the sun, and Bucky is his most ardent worshipper.

“Sam left for work already,” Bucky says, kneading at the soft flesh of Steve’s middle.

“I heard.”

Bucky moves even closer, until their mouths are only half an inch apart. “You know what that means,” he whispers.

“Uh huh.” Steve waits.

“It means... you can eat breakfast in peace without having to listen to his bitching about subway timetables and commuting into the city from Brooklyn.” Steve can’t see his mouth, he’s too close, it’s too dark, but he’s sure he’s got a smug grin plastered across his face. He can imagine it, that cocky spark glinting in the corner, a grin that asks to be wiped off with extreme prejudice.

Steve gropes around until his hand finds Bucky’s shoulder and then flips him onto his back without warning, pinning him down with his knees around Bucky’s thighs and his hands on his biceps. The duvet falls off and lets the winter air of the house chase his hard-earned body heat away, and he doesn’t resist when Bucky wiggles his arms out to pull the duvet back over their heads, sealing them off from the outside world, making a little room for them to share.

“I can eat later,” Steve says, and bends down to brush a soft kiss across Bucky’s open mouth, the first kiss of the day. “But now that we’ve got the house to ourselves and we can make as much noise as we want, the first thing I’m going to do is show you how much I love you.”

It’s good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thank you to everyone involved in the creation of this story, and especially to Nogi, who was the best collaborator a person could ask for.
> 
> (FYI, I wasn't planning on writing an epilogue until 5:30 this morning, the day of my posting deadline.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find us both on Twitter and Tumblr: 
> 
> Nogi: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nogstalgia) and [Tumblr](https://ill-breeding-minds.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Kit: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Hark_Bananas) and [Tumblr](https://harkbananas.tumblr.com/).


End file.
